A recent upgrade to SQL 2012 reminded me of an issue most will face as they upgrade to the new version. With the advent of sequences in SQL Server 2012, a change was made to the way identities are issued. The short story is each time you restart the instances, your identities will increase by 1,000.
This is really only a big deal if
- You are close to the limit of an integer (2147483647) or
- These values are shown to the end users in your system and they wonder why there was a big spike.
Ahasan Habib has a good write-up of the issue, so I won’t recreate all his steps; however, the good news is there is a workaround for this. Like always, make sure you test before you implement the change and hopefully you won’t have to answer the question–why is there a big gap in the numbers? 🙂
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