Question

I have a table with an ID column that I would like to make an auto-increment column. Short of cloning the table into a newly created one with an auto-increment ID column, then renaming the tables, can this be done?

I know that I can use ALTER TABLE to add an auto-increment column, but can I simply add the AUTO_INCREMENT option to an existing column that is the primary key?

Answer 1

Yes, you can.

If you already have a Primary Key for you table, you can alter it to be an auto_increment

ALTER TABLE `table` CHANGE `column` `column` INT( 11 ) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT