I'm posting in the PHP forum cause that's what I'm using to connect to MySQL. If there's a better place to post this let me know...

Anyway, I have data that consists of discrete lines of text which must be in a certain order. Like if you were taking a block of computer code with line numbers and storing each line as a row in a table.

That's fine, but when when it comes time to delete a line, we have a gap in the line numbers. So I have to go to each line after the deletion and decrement it's line number so that it's all in continuous order again.

I'm fine with doing that and obviously the code is pretty straightforward, but I wonder if this is the most efficient way. Is there another way of, say, structuring the data that would reduce the load on the sql server? Honestly, there aren't a ton of lines in each data set - maybe a few hundred. So it's possible that the correct answer is "don't worry about it". Just wondering.