This is one of those simple tip posts that may seem obvious and taken for granted by those of us who have been working with MS SQL Server for a while now but maybe a newbie or two out there will find this helpful.

I find myself resetting an identity column value back to 0 after I’ve deleted all the existing records so the table gets a fresh start at primary key 1. Yes, I know all about primary keys not changing and how the value in the primary key doesn’t matter and so on. Sometimes I just like the primary keys starting at 1.

The following line resets the Identity value for the Customer table to 0 so that the next record added starts at 1.

DBCC CHECKIDENT(table_name, RESEED, new_reseed_value)

Example:

DBCC CHECKIDENT('Customer', RESEED, 0)