Re: Overcoming limits of Auto_Increment

[Rick James]

* The next value assigned to an AUTO_INCREMENT column will be bigger than all existing values.
* Holes are not reused.
* There is one obscure case where where you can DELETE the max value, it will be reused.
* The values will not loop back to 1 (or 0).
* In the case if TINYINT UNSIGNED, it will eventually insert 255. Subsequent inserts will continue to try to insert 255 and get an error (duplicate key).
* A number _can_ be reused, but only if you explicitly specify the number in the INSERT. This is _not_ normally done. (It defeats the purpose of AUTO_INCREMENT.)

Suggest
ALTER TABLE table_name MODIFY id SMALLINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT;
That will change your limit from 255 to 65535.