How To: Reset Identity column in SQL Server

This is one of those simple tip posts that may seem obvious and taken for granted by those of us who have been working with SQL Server for a while now but maybe a newbie or two out there will find this helpful.

Every so often (just this morning!) I find myself resetting an identity column value back to 0 after I've deleted all the existing records so the table gets a fresh start at primary key 1. Yes, I know all about primary keys not changing and how the value in the primary key doesn't matter and so on. Sometimes I just like the primary keys starting at 1.

The following line resets the Identity value for the Customer table to 0 so that the next record added starts at 1.

DBCC CHECKIDENT('Customer', RESEED, 0)