Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
My question is if I have two batch inserts into one table in parallel, how does SQL Server create identity values?
I mean, if in one session I insert multiple rows (Row1-Row2-Row3) and simultaneously another session inserts multiple rows (Row4-Row5-Row6) at the same time, the result would be like this?
Row1
Row2
Row3
Row4
Row5
Row6
or maybe something like this?
Row1
Row6
Row3
Row5
Row4
Row2
You are making the common fallacy of assuming an order in the table. Tables have no order. Only results have order, which is undetermined unless an explicit ORDER BY is specified.
You may ask a different question: how is the identity generated value assigned in case of concurrent inserts? The answer is simple: it doesn’t matter. And if you make any assumption about the order then your code is broken. Same goes for gaps. Your application should work even if the identities generated are completely random, and correctly written application will work if the identity is completely random. Use
SCOPE_IDENTITY()to retrieve the last inserted identity. Better still, use theOUTPUTclause ofINSERT, it works for multi-row inserts too.For the record: the identities are generated in the order on which operations acquire access to the log stream.