Your understanding is right - you should skip that part if you are upgrading from 4.0.2 or later - since 4.0.2 is the first release where the ezurlalias_ml_incr table was introduced.
As to why you miss, it is a wild guess. All I can think of is an installation coming from older versions that was not properly updated before.
I might also add that I find it very strange that your site works at all, as without that table you should have problems generating new url aliases...
Principal Consultant International Business
Member of the Community Project Board
You have right, this installation coming from older versions (3.9.x) and was upgrading more than half year ago. Since that time, that site works correctly (users generated a few hundred content object wich has correct url alias) - wow :)
I'll check my databes online... maybe I was missing something with backup process.
The purpose of the ezurlalias_ml_incr table is to get the correct next numerical ID, without causing MySQL to do an implicit transaction commit.
Before we used to issue a lock statement on ezurlalias_ml table, in order to make sure that we didn't have several requests potentially getting the same ID. However, in MySQL this caused the transaction up to that point to be silently committed, this was not the desired behaviour, thus this new table was introduced to work around that situation.
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Ole Marius Smestad
Lead Engineer eZ Publish
Member of the Community Project Board