Upper limit for autoincrement primary key in SQL Server

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Joel’s answer is correct, it is the upper limit of whatever datatype you use.

Here’s an example of two of them:

  • int: 2^31-1 (2,147,483,647)
  • bigint: 2^63-1 (9,223,372,036,854,775,807)

I have actually hit the limit at a job I worked at. The actual error is:

    Msg 8115, Level 16, State 1, Line 1
    Arithmetic overflow error converting IDENTITY to data type int.
    Arithmetic overflow occurred.

There are a couple fixes to this I can think of off the top of my head. Number 1 is probably very hard and not very likely, number 2 is easy, but will probably cause problems in your code base.

  1. If the identity column doesn’t matter to you (it’s not a Foreign Key, etc.) then you can just reseed the database and reset the identity column.
  2. Change your identity column to a bigger number. So for example if you’ve overflowed an int, change your identity column to a big int. Good luck overflowing that 🙂

There are probably other fixes, but there is no magic bullet easy one. I just hope this doesn’t happen in a table that is the center of a bunch of relationships, because if it does, you’re in for a lot of pain. It’s not a hard fix, just a tedious and long one.

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