Renumbering the Primary Key

[d-woo]

Is there a way to get the primary key (integer auto-increment) to renumber.

I have a growing database of visitor entries. From time to time I remove duplicates or undesirable entries.

I would like to renumber the previous entries such that the latest entry reflects the actual number of total entries (records).

I'm using phpMyAdmin...and didn't see a way to do this.

[Anon]

I'm pretty sure you can't rearrange the entire fragmented auto-increment field to remove 'dead numbers', but say you're at id 55, and you just deleted 6 entries, you want the next entry to be 50, not 56:

execute the mysql code:
alter table <your table> auto_increment=<next number>

[Anon]

You never want to do this. Your primary keys should be sacred. Once a primary key is associated with a record it should always identify that record.

If you want to know how many records are in your table do this:

select count(*) from table

Most databases optomize this search to be very fast, and you don't have to worry about there being bad entries.

Again I can't state it strongly enough "do not change your primary keys". Leave them alone.