Designated ID Pools in MySQL

The other day we faced an issue we never thought we ever would. The project we’ve been working on was developing new features to a courier service’s old system, originally written in PHP 5.2. We already did a lot of code in it but rewriting the whole stuff was out of the question so we had to do some ugly hacks now and then, but we always managed to do everything the customer wanted. I’m sure you know how it works. However, this courier service has made a contract with a new company, who needed an order ID pool assigned to them. It was a pretty reasonable request on their side, but a huge complication for us!