auto_increment product numbers

Hi!

First, you can only have one auto_increment field per table in mysql.

Now, with that in mind, you can't have auto_increment numbers that start with letters ... that will have to be handled by your application.

And regarding the last part, about making the auto_increment fields start up at 10000, you can do that by doing one of the following:

insert a bogus record with the auto_increment set to 9999 and then delete the record.

or

when you create the table, issue the CREATE statement as follows:
CREATE TABLE `tx` (`t` int NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT , PRIMARY KEY (`t`)) AUTO_INCREMENT=10000

jconde is right.  Just as a thought, you might keep the product number split into 2 fields, one (auto_increment) for the number part, the other for the letter part.  Then you can do something like "SELECT CONCAT(letter_field, number_field) AS id".  Your application will have to determine whether to set the letter part to a P or a Q when inserting records.  Also note that you won't be able to have P10000 and Q10000 at the same time in the same table, since the number part will be unique.  You can get around that by having two separate tables, or by just accepting that P/Q numbers might not be consecutive.