[lmm]

It's actually fairly common to see this problem crop up in systems that are using a database table as a queue (which is a bad idea for many reasons, but people still do it) in which case the number of live rows in the table can be fairly small.

[jamwil]

If a SQLServer instance is killed unceremoniously it adds 1000 to the pk increment.

[jiggawatts]

I'm trying not to imagine the poor SQL Server that has crashed one or two million times and hence pushed the ID values into the billions!

[jamwil]

haha—somewhere out there it’s crashing right now. Keep it in your thoughts.