What happens when I exhaust a bigint generated key? How to handle it?

Question

I can\'t imagine for myself a good answer for this, so I thought of asking it here. In my mind, I\'m always wondering what will happen if the AUTO INCREMENT PRIMARY ID

Answer 1

Big int is 2^63 or approximately 10^19. Database benchmarks used to be all the rage a few years ago, using a standardised TPC-C Benchmark

As you can see the fastest relational score of 30,000,000 (3x10^7 transactions per minute) for a relational database. Keep in mind that profile will include a lot of reads, and it is very unlikely that same system can write 30,000,000 rows per minute.

Assuming it is though, you will need approx 3x10^11 minutes to exhaust BigInt. In time measurement we'd understand, that's something like 6 million years

ERROR 1467 (HY000): Failed to read auto-increment value from storage engine

If you do run out, you'll get the above error message, and move across to Guid for primary key. 2^128, there are less digital bits on earth than that number (by a factor of quadrillion).