What happen when SQL Server 2005 happen to reach the maximum for an IDENTITY column? Does it start from the beginning and start refilling the gap?
What is the behavior of SQL Server 2005 when it happen?
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What happen when SQL Server 2005 happen to reach the maximum for an IDENTITY column? Does it start from the beginning and start refilling the gap?
What is the behavior of SQL Server 2005 when it happen?
You will get an overflow error when the maximum value is reached. If you use the bigint datatype with a maximum value of
9,223,372,036,854,775,807this will most likely never be the case.The error message you will get, will look like this:
(Source)
As far as I know MS SQL provides no functionality to fill the identity gaps, so you will either have to do this by yourself or change the datatype of the identity column.
In addition to this you can set the start value to the smallest negative number, to get an even bigger range of values to use.
Here is a good blog post about this topic.