Hi Query Sheperd,

Grant makes some good points. If his response answered your question then read no further.

For my two cents, I would find it helpful to know a bit more about what your data looks like and what it is that you're data is trying to do by "duplicating" rows (but still maintaining uniqueness). You say it's necessary to have multiple copies of the same row in the table, but that alternatively, you could do that and maintain uniqueness by using three other columns as an alternate key. It would seem to me that if you have such a natural key, your problem can be solved by using those three columns in a unique index, and then just insert the "duplicate" rows. If you end up with a new auto-incrementing number, that's fine, because the real constraint is maintained by virtue those three columns, not the identity column.