I looked into a problem that occurred recently when adding observations to the spectra table over break. The error message was

DataError: (1264, u"Out of range value for column 'spec_id' at row 305")

This was due to using a normal INT type for the index. The fix is quite simple in MySQL, you can change the type using the command:

ALTER TABLE table_name MODIFY column_name BIGINT;

However, spec_id is also auto incrementing and the PRIMARY KEY for my table. Here is the description of spec_id BEFORE ALTERing the TABLE:

mysql> describe spectra;
+----------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field          | Type         | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+----------------+--------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| spec_id        | int(11)      | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |

Since there is already a PRIMARY KEY set (spec_id), MySQL will produce an error if PRIMARY KEY is specified when attempting to MODIFY the TABLE. Fortunately, this does not matter — the spec_id column will remain the primary key even if PRIMARY KEY is not specified. However, AUTO_INCREMENT does need to be specified when altering the column.

ALTER TABLE table_name MODIFY column_name BIGINT AUTO_INCREMENT;

In my specific case the command used to change my MySQL column from an INT type to BIGINT was

ALTER TABLE spectra MODIFY spec_id BIGINT AUTO_INCREMENT;

which resulted in

mysql> describe spectra;
+------------+------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field      | Type       | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+------------+------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| spec_id    | bigint(20) | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |

Using BIGINT for the type will allow for up to 9 Quadrillion rows in the table! That should last for a while.