What if I need a very very big autoincrement ID?

Question

According to the MySQL website, the signed bigint can go up to 18446744073709551615. What if I need a number bigger than that for the auto-incrementing primary key?

Answer 1

If you insert 1 million records per second 24x7, it will take 584542 years to reach the limit.

I hope by then a next version of MySQL will support bigger ID columns, and developers will all be able to do back-of-the-envelope calculations before posting to Stack Overflow :)

Answer 2

With such a number (1 to 18446744073709551615), you can give all the animals on the earth a unique ID :)

Answer 3

I suppose you're screwed? You could get rid of MySQL's auto increment and could use a base 64 number you increment yourself.