retired_fibry

I've seen people have luck with these types of threads before so I figured I'd give it a try.

We have a database at work in SQL Server Enterprise I think it's called, in which several of the entries (not sure that's the proper English term) are exactly alike, nothing unique about them. We need to edit them now though (making them unique in the process), but we can't get this to work. I am told that this is because the program doesn't know which entry we want to edit.

I have absolutely no SQL knowledge, and the one who is supposed to, is... not knowledgable enough apparently. So what would be the easiest way to change the entries?

retired_bigsean999

Download yourself SQL Management Express Studio and edit the tables from in there.

retired_fibry

Sorry about that. That's the program we are using now, in which it doesn't work.

retired_bigsean999

So, right click and open table and edit the entries (rows) from in their.

retired_rasha

Not sure what the differences in the express edition are but in the SQL Server Enterprise Manager I just go to the design table view, add a new column whose data type is int, set Identity to Yes, Identity Seed to 1 and Identity Increment to 1. That worked on a test table with indistinguishable rows...

retired_fibry

That's what we've been trying to do, but we get an error message for the rows that are not unique.

retired_fibry

Not sure I understand that, but sounds like it might work. I'll tell the SQL expert :thup:

dejasade

its common practice to make all tables have a unique key. usually called the ID.

can't you go in through the back and manually change them rather tahn doing SQL code?

actually just as Rcjuk says

retired_fibry

Yeah, the tables were supposed to have unique IDs, but Access for some reason (probably due a mistake by the person who set the database up though) decided to give the same ID to a lot of rows so the key became unusable.

We couldn't edit them manually, but Lufbra Bantam suggestion worked perfectly. :thup: