How do you check if IDENTITY_INSERT is set to ON or OFF in SQL Server?

Question

I\'ve searched for this, but threads in which it appeared tended to have answers from people who didn\'t understand the question.

Take the following syntax:

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Answer 1

If you're attempting to turn off IDENTITY_INSERT for some other table to avoid getting an error when you want to set IDENTITY_INSERT on, the following may also work for you. As other have said on this thread IDENTITY_INSERT is a session setting with no direct visibility. However I made the interesting discovery that SET IDENTITY_INSERT OFF doesn't error out for any table that has an identity whether or not IDENTITY_INSERT is ON for that table. So it occurred to me that I could just call SET IDENTITY_INSERT ... OFF for every table with an identity in the database. It feels a bit like a brute force solution, but I found that the following dynamic SQL block did the trick very nicely.

---- make sure IDENTITY_INSERT is OFF ----
DECLARE @cmd NVARCHAR(MAX)
SET @cmd = CAST((SELECT 'SET IDENTITY_INSERT ' + 
             QUOTENAME(OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(t.object_id)) + '.' + 
             QUOTENAME(t.name) + ' OFF' + CHAR(10)
             FROM sys.columns c 
             JOIN sys.tables t ON t.object_id = c.object_id
             WHERE c.is_identity = 1 
             ORDER BY 1 FOR XML PATH('')) AS NVARCHAR(MAX))
EXEC sp_executesql @cmd