Autopopulate primary key

  • Is there a way to autopopulate the primary as can be done in Access?

    -David

  • If designing a table in Enterprise Manager, set the Identity property of your primary key (which would typically be an 'int') to "Yes".

  • Yes, thanks. DTS is generating an error when data is loaded. I'm loading from an excel spreadsheet and the error is: "Cannot insert the value NULL into the column 'key', table 'NW.dbo.dataL', column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails." I'm using DTS to transform the data. I need the primary key field to autopopulate but when the loader gets down to the last row of the excel spreadsheet the next row is just a blank line and somehow DTS doesn't know this is the end of the file data and throws the NULL error. An identity key will not allow nulls which of course I wouldn't want anyway.

  • Okay, I figured out the problem. In DTS there is a checkbox that say "enable identity insert." It must be unchecked which seems counterintuitive because identity insert (autopopulation) is what is desired.

  • identity_insert allows you to specify the identity value yourself rather than have it generated for you, i.e if your excel spreadsheet has values for the column

    Simon Sabin

    Co-author of SQL Server 2000 XML Distilled

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904347088


    Simon Sabin
    SQL Server MVP

    http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/simons

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