Safest way to get last record ID from a table

Question

In SQL Server 2008 and higher what is the best/safest/most correct way

1. to retrieve the ID (based on autoincrementing primary key) out of the database table?

Answer 1

1.  SELECT MAX(Id) FROM Table

Answer 2

And if you mean select the ID of the last record inserted, its

SELECT @@IDENTITY FROM table

Answer 3

SELECT LAST(row_name) FROM table_name

Answer 4

You can try:

SELECT id FROM your_table WHERE id = (SELECT MAX(id) FROM your_table)

Where id is a primary key of the your_table

Answer 5

One more way -

select * from <table> where  id=(select max(id) from <table>)

Also you can check on this link -

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175098.aspx

Answer 6

Safest way will be to output or return the scope_identity() within the procedure inserting the row, and then retrieve the row based on that ID. Use of @@Identity is to be avoided since you can get the incorrect ID when triggers are in play.

Any technique of asking for the maximum value / top 1 suffers a race condition where 2 people adding at the same time, would then get the same ID back when they looked for the highest ID.