SELECT last id, without INSERT

In MySQL, this does return the highest value from the id column:

SELECT MAX(id) FROM tablename;

However, this does not put that id into $n:

$n = mysql_query("SELECT max(id) FROM tablename");

To get the value, you need to do this:

$result = mysql_query("SELECT max(id) FROM tablename");

if (!$result) {
    die('Could not query:' . mysql_error());
}

$id = mysql_result($result, 0, 'id');

If you want to get the last insert ID from A, and insert it into B, you can do it with one command:

INSERT INTO B (col) SELECT MAX(id) FROM A;

You could descendingly order the tabele by id and limit the number of results to one:

SELECT id FROM tablename ORDER BY id DESC LIMIT 1

BUT: ORDER BY rearranges the entire table for this request. So if you have a lot of data and you need to repeat this operation several times, I would not recommend this solution.

I have different solution:

SELECT AUTO_INCREMENT - 1 as CurrentId FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = 'dbname' AND TABLE_NAME = 'tablename'