Selecting Into Tables, Sans Identity

Kenneth Fisher shows a couple of ways to remove an identity property from a column when creating a new table:

A while back I did a post about creating an empty table using a SELECT statement. Basically doing something like this:

1	SELECT TOP 0 * INTO tableNameArchive FROM tableName

will create a new table with the exact same structure as the source table. It can be a really handy way to create an archive table, a temp table, etc. You don’t create any of the extra objects (indexes, triggers, constraints etc) but what you do end up with is every table property from the original table. This includes datatypes, nullability, and (as I’m sure you realized from the title) IDENTITY. Which if you are creating an archive table, a temp table, etc is probably not something you want. Fortunately, there are two easy ways to get rid of the identity.

Click through to see those two methods.