I thought those three utilities were deprecated in SQL 2008. They don't seem to exist in SQL 2012. *confused*

hehe... Good question. I remember experiencing this one while trying to help someone with the file last summer. 🙂 Good times.

I kept looking for a trick... something that wouldn't depend on the data itself that wasn't presented.

Given the data available, I fell back to the ol' standby answer of N'It depends,' and translated that into the available answer. 🙂

Thank you Hugo.

(At least it wasn't something obvious I just wasn't seeing.)

Great question.

But, okay... I give up, how does having an indexed view cause a loss of precision?

(I.e. Yep, I see the error. I don't understand WHY. 🙁 )

*blush* Being wrong is teaching me even more about collations.

I'm also seeing another possible advantage to unicode. Switching to unicode, it looks like NCHAR(198) and NCHAR(230) returns the...

I'd suspect a different set of Extended ASCII characters, probably not...

I got it wrong, but have been playing with the query. If I switch from char(1) values to nchar(1) and search 65535 values, it spits out six values:

Æ198

æ230

?482

?483

?508

?509

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I don't...

Brilliant! Thanks for the question! I believe it's a great question that draws out some discussion.

A big thank you to Carlo and Hugo who provided a more succinct...

Excellent. Thank you.

And, of course, good question today.

okbangas (10/16/2012)

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If it were different in two supported editions of SQL Server, I agree. However, SQL Server 2005 is not supported anymore, so this question is correct for all supported...

And for anyone looking forward to SQL 2012, this is probably a good opportunity to mention that folks might want to look at the SEQUENCE objects.

First, let me reiterate, I'm not arguing the correct answer for the question. I'm responding to why might a quarter of the folks answering might be getting the question...

The seed value for an identity column is defined (usually) when the table is created, and is the first value for the Identity. Every value after that is incremented...