How to get ID of the last updated row in MySQL?

Question

How do I get the ID of the last updated row in MySQL using PHP?

Answer 1

If you are only doing insertions, and want one from the same session, do as per peirix's answer. If you are doing modifications, you will need to modify your database schema to store which entry was most recently updated.

If you want the id from the last modification, which may have been from a different session (i.e. not the one that was just done by the PHP code running at present, but one done in response to a different request), you can add a TIMESTAMP column to your table called last_modified (see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/datetime.html for information), and then when you update, set last_modified=CURRENT_TIME.

Having set this, you can then use a query like: SELECT id FROM table ORDER BY last_modified DESC LIMIT 1; to get the most recently modified row.