I am looking to store a counter value that needs to be incremented from time to time I have a table called **`file_number`** with a single field called **`num`** and just one record to increment the counter I update the record: **`UPDATE file_number SET num = num + 1`** then to retrieve the value I do: **`SELECT num FROM file_number LIMIT 1`** is there a faster way to increment the value of the record and retrieve the value of it ? is it efficient to store counters like this ?