• This is a very good question, thank you.

    I believe that BOL page clearly states that "0 cannot be used", it just does not state it in these words. Here is the quote from BOL:

    increment

    Is the incremental value that is added to the identity value of the previous row

    that was loaded.

    The incremental value by its definition specifies "regular degrees or additions" when gradually increasing some value. Perhaps decreasing can be understood as negative increasing, so in this context they are the same thing. The bottom line is that the incremental value cannot be equal to zero by definition as it would fail to satisfy gradually increasing some value part.

    What I really like about this question is the presence of the user does not have permission option in the answer choices. This is because whether the database user has or does not have permissions to create table, the error message will still be related to invalid increment, because the engine is going to check for invalid values in the table definition script before checking any permissions.

    Oleg