Arthur Fuller explores the value of identity columns and the usefulness of their arbitrary values and discusses ways to use SQL Server 2000's IDENTITY_INSERT setting.

How to Reset an Identity Seed in Microsoft SQL. Sometimes, as when testing a table in a Microsoft SQL Server database, you need to reset an identity column to its initial seed value, typically one.

This method won't work in SQL Server, but Microsoft's Trans. ... Transact-SQL will create a new table with all columns from the rows in "old_table" in which the last name starts with "Ja." ...

SQL Server will take care of updating the datetime columns (which you can call whatever you want) and generating the history table. You can, if you wish, explicitly create your own history table, ...