Add a column to existing table and uniquely number them on MS SQL Server

Question

I want to add a column to an existing legacy database and write a procedure by which I can assign each record a different value. Something like ad

Answer 1

It would help if you posted what SQL database you're using. For MySQL you probably want auto_increment:

ALTER TABLE tableName ADD id MEDIUMINT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT KEY

Not sure if this applies the values retroactively though. If it doesn't you should just be able to iterate over your values with a stored procedure or in a simple program (as long as no one else is writing to the database) and set use the LAST_INSERT_ID() function to generate the id value.