Are there any best practices or guidelines recommended for handling auto increment values in PHP when working with databases?

When working with auto increment values in PHP and databases, it is important to ensure that the incrementation is handled properly to avoid conflicts or unexpected behavior. One recommended best practice is to let the database manage the auto increment values by setting the column as auto increment in the database schema. This way, the database will handle the incrementation automatically when a new record is inserted.

// Example of creating a table with an auto increment column in MySQL
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "myDB";

// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Create table with an auto increment column
$sql = "CREATE TABLE Users (
    id INT(6) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
    firstname VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
    lastname VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
    email VARCHAR(50),
    reg_date TIMESTAMP
)";

if ($conn->query($sql) === TRUE) {
    echo "Table Users created successfully";
} else {
    echo "Error creating table: " . $conn->error;
}

$conn->close();