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Switching In Identity Columns

Kenneth Fisher shows a way of working around the difficulty of adding an identity column to an existing table:

A friend had an interesting problem today. A really big table (multiple millions of rows) and no primary key. He then ran into an issue where he had to have one. The easiest thing is to create a new int column with an identity column right? Unfortunately in this case because of the size of the table, the log growth on adding an identity column was too much. So what to do?

Well, it would be nice if we could add an int column, populate it in chunks, then make it an identity column. Unfortunately, you can’t add identity to an existing column.

Read on for the answer.