I have a MySQL table that contains information on invoices of a company. However, this company has two branches, and each of them has a unique invoicing sequence; a "Serie A" and "Serie B", so to speak. However, this is one single company and I do not want to create two invoice tables. Rather, I somehow want to have two different auto-increments for one table. I know this is technically not possible, but I guess this is a problem others have tackled before, so I'd like to know if there is a well-known 'solution' for this issue?
What I am doing right now is not using the primary key as invoice number (which would be ideal), but rather using a secondary column with the invoice id, which is incremented manually (well, using a PHP script, but it's still not automatic), by checking the latest invoice for that particular series.
This is my current setup:
CREATE TABLE `invoices` (
`id` mediumint unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
`invoicenumber` mediumint unsigned NOT NULL,
`branch` enum('A','B') NOT NULL,
`date` date NOT NULL,
`client` varchar(100) NOT NULL
) COMMENT='' ENGINE='InnoDB';
To check the lateset invoice, I run:
SELECT MAX(invoicenumber+1) AS new_invoice_number FROM invoices WHERE branch = 'A'
Best Answer
What you are proposing to do can only be done with MySQL cleanly under three(3) conditions
Here is your original table layout
Based on the three conditions I just mentioned, here is the new proposed table layout:
Here is an example via sample data and SQL:
Here it is executed:
Give it a Try !!!
CAVEAT : At present, only the MyISAM Storage Engine supports multiple auto_increment values grouped with other columns. This is not possible with InnoDB based on auto_increment columns being tied directly to the gen_clust_index (aka Clustered Index) !!!