Hi Everyone,
Hopefully someone can help.
I've just noticed that on one of our Moodle installs, the user ID of new accounts has jumped to a much larger number.
Looking at the mdl_user, all id's are sequential from 0 up to 9537, then the next account created after that is 500243593. And all accounts created after that are continuing from 500243593
We don't have any hacks to the core code. Has anyone else experienced this issue before and able to offer assistance?
Moodle 3.8.4+
Many Thanks
If this is the mdl_user.id column this isn't managed or incremented by Moodle, it's the database software which does this.
Whether and how this can be reset would depend on the database software, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL or SQL Server.
With MySQL 5.7 and earlier, the counter gets reset to the highest value present + 1 when MySQL is restarted. For example:
But:
So if you were using MySQL 5.7 or earlier and deleted the rows from mdl_user (not just deleting them from Moodle as this doesn't actually remove the rows) then restarting MySQL should reset the counter.
However in MySQL 8.0 and later (and MariaDB 10.2.4 and later), restarting doesn't reset this counter. MariaDB also has SET insert_id which may be useful.
I'm less familiar with PostgreSQL and SQL Server so I don't know about resetting these counters off the top of my head.
If you were looking to change these I'd recommend 1) making sure there was a database backup and 2) trying this on a test system first to make sure it works as expected.