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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-23T22:20:50+00:00

I have a table that I am using to queue information before it is

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I have a table that I am using to queue information before it is sent off to another system (Dynamics CRM). I write information to that queue and another service comes along and writes the data to CRM.

I used an identity value for the primary key and save this key with the information so I can track where it came from if anything goes wrong. After pulling the data out of the queue, I delete the record.

However, it looks like SQL Server is reusing keys on the identity field. Many ids are used only once, but many are used twice and quite a few have been used three times. Obviously this makes looking up a history by that id useless. Am I doing something wrong? I thought identity values should be unique and a table should not reuse them.

Here are the properties for the column, if that helps.

Column Properties

More properties on the primary key property:

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Identity values will be unique within the table as the moment it is needed.

    The SQL engine has no knowledge of old identity values if you truncate the table.

    If you want a value that will only ever be used once during the lifetime of a table you should consider a GUID or create a unique key based on identity + datetime.

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