IDENTITY to an Existing Column

There are times when we need to modify the structure of our tables. One common requirement is to add an identity property to an existing column in the SQL Server.

In SQL Server, The identity column uniquely identifies a row. we can have only one identity column per table. This can be beneficial for creating primary keys or other scenarios where unique, incremental values are required.

We can use IDENTITY to define a column with auto-increment values. It auto-generates a new unique number when inserting a new record into the table.

Syntax:

IDENTITY [ (seed , increment) ] 

• Seed: The identity column’s first value is known as the seed. If we specify a seed, SQL Server will begin generating identity values starting from this seed. For example, if the seed is 1, the first identity value will be 1.
• Increment: The increment is the value added to the seed to get the next identity value. if the increment is 1, each subsequent identity value will be incremented by 1.

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