[Johngibb]

Are you sure about that? I am almost positive that you're wrong, and @@identity is per connection. Otherwise how woul it know which table to return an identity for?

I thought that the difference had to do with what's returned if a trigger does an insert or something like that...

[mey]

@@identity is per session, but can return other things if you are using triggers (since the trigger will happen before your retrieval of @@identity). One more reason I hate triggers (we also use scope_identity only).

More fun @ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms187342.aspx

[biot]

You're right. As mey pointed out via the docs, @@identity is for the current session, but may return unexpected results if a trigger fires as part of the statement(s) or if you are using replication. It's almost never what you actually wanted whereas scope_identity() is. Come to think of it, perhaps the vendor I mentioned was using ident_current('tablename') which returns the last identity generated for the specified table name regardless of session and scope; this would explain the resulting behavior of the app.

[Johngibb]

Yep, that'd do it!