Automatically add letters in front of an auto-increment fieild

Question

Is it possible to attach a letter in front of an auto-increment in MySQL. I have several tables in my database, some of which have unique id's created by auto-increment. I want to be able to distinguish between the auto-generated numbers by a letter at the front.

This is not a feature which is absolutely required but it would just help making small tasks easy.

Answer 1

You could create views for the tables that need distinctive letters in front of their ID values, and read the tables through the views:

CREATE VIEW VTableA
AS
SELECT
  CONCAT('A', ID) AS ID,
  other columns
FROM TableA

Same for other tables.