Increment Function

[Ian Biner]

Hello,

I'm trying to create a counter.
The way it's currently structured, I find the record I'm looking for, extract the last number from the counter field, add 1 to that number, then update the record.

That's two calls to mySQL, with a few lines of php code in between. If I wanted to lock the record, I'd need to build a little loop that checks its lock status, otherwise, a user could access the record in the time in between a user reading it and then re-writing it. That seems inefficient.

Is there an SQL function that simply allows me to increment a numeric field (not auto-increment... this is a counter, not a record number)?

Thanks
Ian