Documentation for JIRA 5.2. Documentation for other versions of JIRA is available too. 
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Please see Configuring Project Keys for details.
Although JIRA normally starts counting issue ids from 1 ('ABC-1', 'ABC-2' etc), you can adjust the starting count by editing the project.pcounter row in the JIRA database. Because JIRA caches this value in memory, you will need to shut down JIRA first, update this value in the JIRA database, then restart JIRA.