Sql server serial

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Community Pick: Many members of our community have endorsed this article. Experts with Gold status have received one of our highest-level Expert Awards, which recognize experts for their valuable contributions. Published: Updated: DateSerial takes in a number of years, months, and days and returns the appropriate date allowing you vary inputs and use negatives without having to worry about crossing over months or years.

If you want more information on how the DateSerial function worked within Access, see reference below. Others may exist, but let's explore my version The Methodology The main principle is to utilize simple DateAdd function. The DateAdd function takes a datepart like "day", "month", or "year", etc. Basically, once a date is established by parsing the year sent to our DateSerial function, we can simply add months and days using DateAdd.

Active 2 months ago. Viewed k times. Any ideas? Thanks in advance. Nomad Nomad 3 3 gold badges 9 9 silver badges 18 18 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Avishek Avishek 5 5 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. Oleg Dok Merin Nakarmi Merin Nakarmi 2, 3 3 gold badges 30 30 silver badges 39 39 bronze badges. What is the meaning of "rep whoring! Do you think it is good to write such remarks on a public forum by an educated person like you?

Thanks for the correction. Arulmouzhi Arulmouzhi 1, 9 9 silver badges 16 16 bronze badges. Sagar Mahajan Sagar Mahajan 1 1 silver badge 4 4 bronze badges. You should explain your SQL snippet. Taryn k 54 54 gold badges silver badges bronze badges.

Khabir Khabir 4, 1 1 gold badge 13 13 silver badges 26 26 bronze badges. Here is an example. Suppose I have a table with an Id field as a primary key identity. A primary key is a logical concept - it is the means by which you will uniquely identify each record in a table. There are several types of primary key - a natural key uses a data attribute from the business domain which is guaranteed to have the requirements for a primary key unique, not null, immutability such as a social security number, a compound key is a key made up of multiple columns often used in 'parent-child' relationships , and a surrogate key is created by the system; it could be an auto-increment, or identity column.

Identity is a data type. It is very useful for use as a surrogate primary key, because it has all the attributes required. It's unlikely you'd use the identity type for purposes other than as a primary key, but there's nothing to stop you from doing so. So, not all primary keys use the identity data type, and not all identity columns are primary keys. Primary key is a kind of unique key.

It's, in fact, isn't required to be integer at all — it can be text or other type. Primary key is a bit stricter than usual unique key in that it usually implies NOT NULL and, in additional to that, only one primary key is allowed per table while several unique keys per table are allowed in addition to primary key. It's just a feature that during an row-insert operation a specific column, when not being explicitly set to some value, is automatically initialized to most often consecutive integer values.

I mean that it makes column values to be automatically initialized with an integer sequence, but doesn't guarantee uniqueness and strict consequentiality. In a database table, every row should be unique, and you need to be able to identify a particular row uniquely.