identity to be incremented only if record is inserted

Question

sql server 2005 : i have a column empid in employee table with identity on.if there is some error while inserting data into table .identity is incremented .i want identity to be incremented only if record is inserted .like if i have generated emp id from 1 to 5 and then on 6th record insertion error ocurrs.and on next record insertion identity value will be 7 .i want it to be 6.

Answer 1

I don't think this can be done. If you want your identity numbers to be exactly sequential then you may have to generate them yourself, rather than using the SQL Identity feature.

edit: Even rolling back the failed transactions will not make the Identity count go back down, this is by design, see this other question.

Answer 2

Why do you want to do that ?

The identity column should only be used as an 'internal administrative value' for the database, and it should have no 'business value', so why does it matter that there are gaps in that sequence ?
If identity is used correctly, then users of your software will never be faced with the column that has an identity value; you just use it to uniquely identify a record.

Answer 3

When you need to have this specific behaviour you should use stored procedures to generate the ID. This way you can really to a rollback. But keep in mind that the current behaviour is by purpose. Transaction isolation and different read levels (dirty reads) will most likely get you into trouble when you don't use locking on that id field in your masterdata table that holds the current or next ID value.

Answer 4

What valid business reason do you have for caring if there are gaps? There is no reason for the database to care and every reason to want to make sure that identity values are never reused for something else as they can cause major problems with data integrity with looking up information based on old reports, etc. Suppose you have a report that shows the orders last month and then you delete one of the records becasue the customer was duplicated and thus dedupped. Then you reuse the identity field for the dupped customer that was removed. NOw someone looknig at last month's report goes to look up customer 12345 and the data associated with that cuisotmer belongs to John Smith rather than Sally Jones. BUt the person doesn;t know that because she is using an aggreagate, so now she has incorrect information that was totally avoidable. If she was looking up the delted customer, the process instead could have redirected her to the correct customer left after the dedupping.