Question

Say we have two tables:

• table1 (id, name, type) where id is a primary key, and auto-incremented
• table2 (item_id, place) where item_id refers to id in table1

I want to do the following:

insert into table1(name, type) values (y, z);

Assuming that that query would assign id=x for that row, then:

insert into table2(item_id, place) values (x, w);

How could I do that?
In other words, how could I get the id of the row that has just been added?

Answer 1

insert into table1(name, type) values (y, z);
insert into table2(item_id, place) values (LAST_INSERT_ID() , w);

The LAST_INSERT_ID() will do this for you. Most programming languages have a special function that call this for you, but it works in pure MySQL.