title: MySQL serial vs auto-increment for id column
body: <p><em>Disclaimer: I have only novice knowledge of and experience with databases</em>.</p>
  <p>I'm following a Laravel course on Laracasts, and in the <a href="https://laracasts.com/series/laravel-6-from-scratch/episodes/9" rel="nofollow noreferrer">database video</a>, the instructor sets the ID column to a type of <code>SERIAL</code>. This is different to how I've seen this done in all other database tutorials, where they will usually check  the A_I (auto-increment) checkbox, and this automatically makes the column primary, and leaves the type to be something like INT.</p>
  <p>Hovering over the <code>SERIAL</code> type in PHPMyAdmin tells me that it's an alias for <code>BIGINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT UNIQUE</code>, but is there ever a particular reason to prefer it over the settings that checking the A_I checkbox sets up? Does either way offer any advantages or disadvantages?</p>
  <p>I did find <a href="https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don%27t_Do_This#Don.27t_use_serial" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> for PostgreSQL, indicating <code>SERIAL</code> is old and outdated, but I couldn't find an equivalent for MySQL and I'm unsure if the same applies to it.</p>