Auto Increment with Letters?

[partypete]

Hello,

Is it possible to make MySQL use letters to auto-increment instead of numbers?

So first it would auto increment from:
a to z
...then...
aa to az
...then...
ba to bz
...etc...

Thanks!

[Sxooter]

No, but you could easily write a trigger function to do so in either FirebirdSQL or PostgreSQL.

[partypete]

Dang. MySQL is all I have access to.

Thanks anyways.

[Sxooter]

If your application is the only thing touching the database, you could write a php function to basically do the same thing. Just create a single row single column table that holds the auto-inc value, (i.e. af) then you lock it, read it, increment it, write it back out, and then use that in your insert query to the actual data holding table.

[Shrike]

You could also use ord() and chr() to manipulate letters as numeric values. Lower case a-z is represented in ASCII as 97-122. Some additional logic would be needed to start from a once z is reached.