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

About The Author

Suprotim Agarwal, MCSD, MCAD, MCDBA, MCSE, is the founder of DotNetCurry, DNC Magazine for Developers, SQLServerCurry and DevCurry. He has also authored a couple of books 51 Recipes using jQuery with ASP.NET Controls and a new one recently at The Absolutely Awesome jQuery CookBook.

Suprotim has received the prestigous Microsoft MVP award for nine times in a row now. In a professional capacity, he is the CEO of A2Z Knowledge Visuals Pvt Ltd, a digital group that represents premium web sites and digital publications comprising of Professional web, windows, mobile and cloud developers, technical managers, and architects.

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