I have seen problems with this. The existing auto-incremented fields were just fine but new ones were a little bit off. In a normal mysqldb if you have a single record with id 1 and delete it then add another record the new record will get id 2 (not filling in the missing 1). I've seen a case that after a mysqldump and restore the new records did not honour have that behaviour, "missing" ids were reused. I'm sure that I did something wrong with the dump but in that case it was not important so I didn't research it further.the reason why i don't want to do the database transfer using data generated by mysqldump is because i want all the auto-generated record_ids to stay the same in the new system.The record_ids will stay the same with mysqldump. What makes you think they will not?
My bad -- this is indeed a problem using mysqldump. I just checked the manpage and it seems that you cannot tell mysqldump to add AUTO_INCREMENT=... to the CREATE TABLE statement (please correct me if you know a way).
phpmyadmin creates dumps with AUTO_INCREMENT information -- i thought mysqldump would do the same -- but it does not.
Best regards, Henrik -- Henrik Heil, zweipol Coy & Heil GbR http://www.zweipol.net/