How to monitor IDENTITY column values in SQL Server

One (lesser known) task of a DBA should be to keep an eye on the values of the IDENTITY columns so that they do not hit the ceiling for their data type and catch you by surprise. Not a pleasant one, of course. This is all the more important if you have tables that grow quickly.

Vyas Kondreddi has a nice script to look for current IDENTITY values in all tables of a database and compare that value against its datatype. It could be useful to automate it as an alert or run it manually once in a while. He has versions of the script for SQL Server 7.0, 2000, 2005 and later but all of them run against one database at a time which might make it a little inconvenient to run against all your 200 databases.

I’ve taken the script compatible with SQL Server 2005 and later, and enhanced it a bit to run it against all databases in one go using the undocumented stored procedure SP_MSFOREACHDB. There goes your excuse to procrastinate this!

Change the value against the TOP keyword to suit your preference. I’ve used TOP 5.

Download my script from the TechNet Gallery link –
http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Monitor-IDENTITY-column-fd9c6552

The output would look like the screenshot below.

MonitorIdentityColumns