OK Identity does not reuse. Should it ? Depends on the requirements. If your id column reaches the maximum value (int/bigint !!), you're in big troubles anyway and probably you'll have to adjust you id-producing algorithm. With Identity you could checkident and go on. Besides it one should never deduct anything from an id (low id is older than high id) so who cares about gaps. If you use GUID, you cannot deduct anything, but does your datamodel need that overhead ? There's a lot of info in the net regarding identity and surogate-keys.