Auto increment primary key in SQL Server Management Studio 2012

Question

How do I auto increment the primary key in a SQL Server database table, I\'ve had a look through the forum but can\'t see how.

Answer 1

You have to expand the Identity section to expose increment and seed.

Edit: I assumed that you'd have an integer datatype, not char(10). Which is reasonable I'd say and valid when I posted this answer

Answer 2

CREATE TABLE Persons (
    Personid int IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,
    LastName varchar(255) NOT NULL,
    FirstName varchar(255),
    Age int
);

The MS SQL Server uses the IDENTITY keyword to perform an auto-increment feature.

In the example above, the starting value for IDENTITY is 1, and it will increment by 1 for each new record.

Tip: To specify that the "Personid" column should start at value 10 and increment by 5, change it to IDENTITY(10,5).

To insert a new record into the "Persons" table, we will NOT have to specify a value for the "Personid" column (a unique value will be added automatically):

Answer 3

Expand your database, expand your table right click on your table and select design from dropdown.

Now go Column properties below of it scroll down and find Identity Specification, expand it and you will find Is Identity make it Yes. Now choose Identity Increment right below of it give the value you want to increment in it.

Answer 4

Be carefull like if you want the ID elements to be contigius or not. As SQLSERVER ID can jump by 1000 .

Examle: before restart ID=11 after restart , you insert new row in the table, then the id will be 1012.

Answer 5

I had this issue where I had already created the table and could not change it without dropping the table so what I did was: (Not sure when they implemented this but had it in SQL 2016)

Right click on the table in the Object Explorer:

Script Table as > DROP And CREATE To > New Query Editor Window

Then do the edit to the script said by Josien; scroll to the bottom where the CREATE TABLE is, find your Primary Key and append IDENTITY(1,1) to the end before the comma. Run script.

The DROP and CREATE script was also helpful for me because of this issue. (Which the generated script handles.)

Answer 6

When you're creating the table, you can create an IDENTITY column as follows:

CREATE TABLE (
  ID_column INT NOT NULL IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,
  ...
);

The IDENTITY property will auto-increment the column up from number 1. (Note that the data type of the column has to be an integer.) If you want to add this to an existing column, use an ALTER TABLE command.

Edit:
Tested a bit, and I can't find a way to change the Identity properties via the Column Properties window for various tables. I guess if you want to make a column an identity column, you HAVE to use an ALTER TABLE command.