Question

what if you have so many entries in a table, that 2^32 is not enough for your auto_increment ID within a given period (day, week, month, …)?
What if the largest datatype MySQL provides is not enough?

I’m wondering how should I solve a situation where I’m having so many entries added to my table which require unique ID, but I fill up my datatype within one period?

How could I natively within, MySQL (or any other system), achieve unlimited amount of unique IDs or at least increase it exponentially?

Ideally I would expect something like

> SELECT * FROM table;

+---+------+
| a |  b   |
+---+------+
| 1 |  1   |
| 1 |  2   |
| 1 |  3   |
|...| .... |
|...| .... |
| 1 | 2^32 |
| 2 |  1   |
| 2 |  2   |
+---+------+

Which exponentially increases the amount of entries.

How do you cope with such situations?
Remember – requirement is to have unique ID for any entry.

Answer 1

You could use BIGINT for the primary key. This is a 64-bit number by default.

Edit #2: Apparently what I said before about varying the BIGINT byte length was incorrect. BIGINT is fixed at an 8-byte limit.