Generate your own serial numbers for a table

There are times when you would want to generate your own serial numbers for a query. For eg: If we take the Customers table in Northwind database, the CustomerID is not numeric Eg: 'ALFKI'.

If you want to generate your own serial number for the Customers table while displaying the records, use the ROW_NUMBER(). As mentioned in BOL "ROW_NUMBER() returns the sequential number of a row within a partition of a result set, starting at 1 for the first row in each partition"

Here is a query that will help you generate your own serial numbers for the CustomerID

SELECT (ROW_NUMBER() OVER ( ORDER BY CustomerID)) AS ID ,
CustomerID, ContactName, CompanyName, ContactTitle
FROM Customers

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About The Author

Suprotim Agarwal, ASP.NET Architecture MVP works as an Architect Consultant and provides consultancy on how to design and develop Web applications.

Suprotim is also the founder and primary contributor to DevCurry, DotNetCurry and SQLServerCurry. He has also written an EBook 51 Recipes using jQuery with ASP.NET Controls.

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