Suppose your table has two records in it, with Id’s 1 and 2 and no attempt has been made to add a 3rd record. In this case the two queries above will return the same values i.e. 2. Now let’s insert another record, but we’ll effectively cause it to fail (by starting and rolling back a transaction).

BEGIN TRANSACTION
INSERT INTO mytables VALUES (’xxx’) /* not sure what your fields are */
ROLLBACK TRANSACTION

Now, SELECT MAX(id) will return 2 as before, but IDENT_CURRENT will return 3 as this was the last attempted value.

If you now do an successful INSERT, both methods will return 4.

As you can see, it’s vital that you perform all operations including the selection of the new id in a transaction.

From a performance point of view, the IDENT_CURRENT should generally be faster.

Miles

SELECT IDENT_CURRENT(’my_table’)
SELECT MAX(id) FROM my_table

also, which is more efficient?

Cheers
Dan