What are the drawbacks of using the Auto Increment value to determine the number of records in a table in PHP?

Using the Auto Increment value to determine the number of records in a table in PHP can be problematic because it may not accurately reflect the actual number of records if rows are deleted or if the Auto Increment value is reset. To accurately count the number of records in a table, it is better to use a SQL query to count the rows. 

// Connect to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

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

// Query to count the number of records in a table
$sql = "SELECT COUNT(*) as count FROM table_name";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        echo "Number of records: " . $row["count"];
    }
} else {
    echo "0 records found";
}

// Close connection
$conn->close();

Keywords

Auto Increment records table drawbacks PHP

Related Questions