Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 08/19/07 16:02

Bill E. (billmiami2@netscape.net) writes:
> That's fine Erland, but you had to reseed the identity in order to get
> the next value to fall below an existing one.
> I'll look into it but I seriously doubt that anyone did this. Is
> there another way that this could happen?
> For example, a sudden shutdown of the server or some kind of error in
> a DTS process?

How much below is it? In SQL 6.5 it was indeed a common problem that
the identity values fell behind when there was a unexpected shutdown,
but I have not seen this with SQL 2000 and SQL 2005. In any case, it
the value is just a little behind the max, one could suspect something
like that. But it if the difference is big, I rather place my bets on
DBCC CHECKIDENT or some other manoeuvre, although I can't think of one
right now.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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