Does anyone know how to have the primary key column in a table be set to auto increment. (i.e. the other two columns (first_name, last_name are filled in, and the first column "id" is the primary key and is not manually filled in, but instead given an int value) I am using Microsoft SQL Server Managment Studio Express 2005 and am stuck on this problem.

You can do this through the properties window. Right click the User table and select Modify. Now select the 'id' column and look at the properties window at the bottom of your screen.

In the properties you'll see an Identity Specification attribute with a '+' sign next to it. Click on the plus sign and where it says (Is Identity), change it from a 'No' to a 'Yes'.

You'll notice that the change also updates the Identity Increment and Identity Seed properties (both should be 1, most likely, for your purposes).

Hope this solves your problem,

Andrew C

creat table tablename
(
  id int identity(1,1),
  first_name char(8),
  last_name char(8)
)

try it on