A primary key simply means the values in a field need to be unique. An
identity means that the field will have an integer value and will increment.
The two items are often used together, but they don't have to be. For
example, a primary key could be the two-letter abbreviation for all the US
states, there's no need for the records to have an identity row if they
already have a unique value.
Do you have any data in the table that you are trying to create the identity
row on? It could be that you already have null values in the field you are
trying to change. In this case, you can't do that since sql server express
doesn't know how to convert it into an identity. You may have to populate
the field ahead of time with a series of numbers first. Not too hard to do
with SQL, or you can create a new temporary field, set it as an identity and
hit save and hope sql server can fill in the values for you, then delete the
old row and rename the new temporary one to the name of the old, problematic
row.
--
Hope this helps,
Mark Fitzpatrick
Former Microsoft FrontPage MVP 199?-2006
"darrel" <no*****@nowhere.comwrote in message
news:OC**************@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
>they have nothing to do with each other.
What's the difference between them?
> to make a column an identity column it must be a numeric column, then
you set the property.
It's set to 'int' right now, but I still can't change the Identity
Specification for some reason.
-Darrel