Good question, but the explanation should really mention that DBCC CHECKIDENT has two different behaviors based on whether or not there have been prior (non-truncated) rows present. I know...

Good question, but it does miss out on a good opportunity to point out that these two have the same result (in this particular case):

SELECT COALESCE(Col1, Col2) AS 'FirstNotNull' FROM...

For anybody like myself who was still a bit unclear, it may help to think of COALESCE as having 2 separate aspects. It needs to return a value, and...

Interestingly, while the answer does hold for 2005+, for us dinosaurs who still have a few SQL Server 2000 systems, it throws a parse time syntax error on the USER...

steven.bingham (3/28/2013)

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Team,

...

Often times you can run stored procedures from many processes, like other stored

procedures, where there are different levels of transactions. The problem is that if you

write to...

Paul White (2/26/2011)

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It is possible to avoid the dummy column, ever-growing number of rows in the hidden tables, and avoid locking issues by using an approach based on this example...