Question

I have a table with an identity column that have incremented by 1 for all its records then suddenly last week it started incrementing in a weird way.
For example:

Identity – Date

31891 2010-02-27 09:47:41    
39258 2010-02-27 13:13:03    
41994 2010-02-27 13:43:56   
45119 2010-02-27 14:44:43    
45120 2010-02-27 14:51:33
45121 2010-02-27 15:01:12    
63943 2010-02-27 19:38:24    
63944 2010-02-27 20:14:11   
73344 2010-02-27 22:06:35   
78298 2010-02-27 22:54:43    
124007 2010-02-28 07:02:51    
130482 2010-02-28 07:35:34    
130483 2010-02-28 08:05:02    
144470 2010-02-28 10:11:57    
164253 2010-02-28 11:30:00   
254921 2010-02-28 16:59:51    
254922 2010-02-28 17:06:28

If you look at the time you can see that the longer time it is between inserts the highter the increment is. I am totally lost to why this is happening. I do not perform any delete queries on the table so it can’t be deleted rows.

Answer 1

An identity sequence is incremented any time an insert is attempted — this includes a failed or rolled back INSERT. Do you have any processes generating insert errors or rolling back?