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The Build Book of News

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[Video] Free DBA Training Month: Configuring TempDB, Lock Pages in Memory, and the DAC

While you’re stuck inside wondering if you’ll ever be able to attend a user group meeting again, I’m giving you free access to training materials that your boss probably wouldn’t have been nice enough to buy you anyway. So far this week, we’ve covered DBCC CHECKDB, how to set up Ola Hallengren’s maintenance scripts, and restoring for oops deletes. Today, let’s talk about two common configuration issues. Don’t dilly-dally on these though: these blog posts will be online during May only, and they’ll disappear on June 1.

SQLServerCentral Article

The IDENTITY Column Property

There are a number of ways to generate key values in SQL Server tables including the IDENTITY column property, the NEWID() function and more recently, SEQUENCES. The IDENTITY column property is the earliest of these methods. It was introduced very early in the history of SQL Server and it is arguably the simplest approach. Though old, IDENTITY is still maintained in modern versions of SQL Server and is still relevant for simple use cases.

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Question of the Day

Checking Identities

The DBCC CHECKIDENT command is used when working with identity values. I have a table with 10 rows in it that looks like this: 

TravelLogID CityID  StartDate   EndDate
1           1       2025-01-11  2025-01-16
2           2       2025-01-11  2025-01-16
3           3       2025-01-11  2025-01-16
4           4       2025-01-11  2025-01-16
5           5       2025-01-11  2025-01-16
6           6       2025-01-11  2025-01-16
7           7       2025-01-11  2025-01-16
8           8       2025-01-11  2025-01-16
9           9       2025-01-11  2025-01-16
10          10      2025-01-11  2025-01-16
The docs for DBCC CHECKIDENT say this if I run with only the table parameter: "If the current identity value for a table is less than the maximum identity value stored in the identity column, it is reset using the maximum value in the identity column. " I run this code: 
DELETE dbo.TravelLog WHERE TravelLogID >= 9
GO
DBCC CHECKIDENT(TravelLog, RESEED)
GO
INSERT dbo.TravelLog
(
    CityID,
    StartDate,
    EndDate
)
VALUES
(4, '2025-09-14', '2025-09-17')
GO
What is the identity value for the new row inserted by the insert statement above?

See possible answers