SQL Server, How to set auto increment after creating a table without data loss?

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Changing the IDENTITY property is really a metadata only change. But to update the metadata directly requires starting the instance in single user mode and messing around with some columns in sys.syscolpars and is undocumented/unsupported and not something I would recommend or will give any additional details about.

For people coming across this answer on SQL Server 2012+ by far the easiest way of achieving this result of an auto incrementing column would be to create a SEQUENCE object and set the next value for seq as the column default.

Alternatively, or for previous versions (from 2005 onwards), the workaround posted on this connect item shows a completely supported way of doing this without any need for size of data operations using ALTER TABLE...SWITCH. Also blogged about on MSDN here. Though the code to achieve this is not very simple and there are restrictions – such as the table being changed can’t be the target of a foreign key constraint.

Example code.

Set up test table with no identity column.

CREATE TABLE dbo.tblFoo 
(
bar INT PRIMARY KEY,
filler CHAR(8000),
filler2 CHAR(49)
)


INSERT INTO dbo.tblFoo (bar)
SELECT TOP (10000) ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT 0))
FROM master..spt_values v1, master..spt_values v2

Alter it to have an identity column (more or less instant).

BEGIN TRY;
    BEGIN TRANSACTION;

    /*Using DBCC CHECKIDENT('dbo.tblFoo') is slow so use dynamic SQL to
      set the correct seed in the table definition instead*/
    DECLARE @TableScript nvarchar(max)
    SELECT @TableScript="
    CREATE TABLE dbo.Destination(
        bar INT IDENTITY(" + 
                     CAST(ISNULL(MAX(bar),0)+1 AS VARCHAR) + ',1)  PRIMARY KEY,
        filler CHAR(8000),
        filler2 CHAR(49)
        )

        ALTER TABLE dbo.tblFoo SWITCH TO dbo.Destination;
    '       
    FROM dbo.tblFoo
    WITH (TABLOCKX,HOLDLOCK)

    EXEC(@TableScript)


    DROP TABLE dbo.tblFoo;

    EXECUTE sp_rename N'dbo.Destination', N'tblFoo', 'OBJECT';


    COMMIT TRANSACTION;
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
    IF XACT_STATE() <> 0 ROLLBACK TRANSACTION;
    PRINT ERROR_MESSAGE();
END CATCH;

Test the result.

INSERT INTO dbo.tblFoo (filler,filler2) 
OUTPUT inserted.*
VALUES ('foo','bar')

Gives

bar         filler    filler2
----------- --------- ---------
10001       foo       bar

Clean up

DROP TABLE dbo.tblFoo

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