Say you’ve got a table with an identity column, something that’s supposed to start at 1 and go up to a bajillion:
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.Orders; CREATE TABLE dbo.Orders (Id INT IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED, OrderDate DATETIME2, CustomerName NVARCHAR(50)); GO /* Put a starter row in there: */ INSERT INTO dbo.Orders (OrderDate, CustomerName) VALUES (SYSDATETIME(), N’First’);
And you use that identity number for invoice numbers, or customer numbers, or whatever, and you expect that every single number will be taken up. For example, your accounting team might say, “We see order ID 1, 3, and 4 – what happened