There are a number of options for generating ID values for your tables. In this post, Alexey Mikotkin of Devart explores your choices for generating identifiers with a look at auto_increment, triggers, UUID and sequences.

AUTO_INCREMENT

Frequently, we happen to need to fill tables with unique identifiers. Naturally, the first example of such identifiers is PRIMARY KEY data. These are usually integer values hidden from the user since their specific values are unimportant.

When adding a row to a table, you need to take this new key value from somewhere. You can set up your own process of generating a new identifier, but MySQL comes to the aid of the user with the AUTO_INCREMENT column setting. It is set as a column attribute and allows you to generate unique integer identifiers. As an example, consider the …

MySQL has locking capabilities, for example table and row level locking, and such locks are needed to control data integrity in multi-user concurrency. Deadlocks—where two or more transactions are waiting for one another to give up locks before the transactions can proceed successfully—are an unwanted situation. It is a classic problem for all databases including MySQL/PostgreSQL/Oracle etc. By default, MySQL detects the deadlock condition and to break the deadlock it rolls back one of the transactions.

For a deadlock example, see InnoDB deadlocks

Some misconceptions

There are some misconceptions about deadlocks:

a) Transaction isolation levels are responsible for deadlocks. The possibility of deadlocks is not affected by isolation level. Isolation level changes the behavior of read …