Today, I want to talk about how to insert a value into a identity column. Most of the time, the auto increment or IDENTITY column will just be happy by being left alone. Very seldom, a power user does something stupid like turn off the foreign key constraint and remove a key from a reference table. How do we add back the key? I will be dusting off the [WILDLIFE] database from a prior article. This database has one table named [ANIMALS]. It has 445 unique animal names each with…
Day: December 4, 2012
Reseeding identity columns
I recently worked on a project I which I redesigned sales data warehouse as a STAR schema, using daily file partitions, with a automatic sliding window, and applying data compression at the page level. I ended up reducing a 5 terabyte database to less than 750 GB. I will be writing several articles on the lessons that I learned during the process. Today, I want to talk about how to reseed a identity column if a data load for a dimension fails. Most dimension tables use a surrogate key to…