title: When to fix auto-increment gaps in MYSQL
body: <p>The database I am working on right now has records being added and removed by the 10s of thousands and because of this there are gaps in the auto-incremented key hundreds of thousands big and auto-increment numbers well into the billions. </p>
  
  <p>These numbers are never stored to reference the individual record but are used to reference the record when doing on-the-fly calculations.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any reason to remove these gaps and reset the auto-increment number or is this inconsequential? </p>
  
  <p>The id field is an unsigned int, should I increase it to an unsigned big int? From what I understand, right now if it hits 4,294,967,295 it will break.</p>