[Paul M]

Ah, I see what you are talking about now - the phrase types.

The phrasetypeid field in the phrasetype table is not an auto-increment field, so you cannot add a new record with a null value and expect mysql to allocate a value to it - you have to supply a number.

However, the phraseid, in the phrase table is auto-increment, and you can add actual phrases with a null value and let mysql number them - this is what I thought you were referring to as you quoted phraseid rather than the typeid.

Also the typeid is an unsigned smallint - which means you only have up to 65,500 (ish) to play with.

I would suggest using something like typeid = (10000 + int(time() / 10000) to give you a unique id at installation time (the value of this would currently be around 21,000 and changes every 2.75 hours).