In MS SQL Server, is there a way to “atomically” increment a column being used as a counter?

Question

Assuming a Read Committed Snapshot transaction isolation setting, is the following statement \"atomic\" in the sense that you won\'t ever \"lose\" a concurrent increment?

Answer 1

I used this SP to handle the case where name does not have a counter initially

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[GetNext](
@name   varchar(50) )
AS BEGIN SET NOCOUNT ON

DECLARE @Out TABLE(Id BIGINT)

MERGE TOP (1) dbo.Counter as Target
    USING (SELECT 1 as C, @name as name) as Source ON Target.name = Source.Name
    WHEN MATCHED THEN UPDATE SET Target.[current] = Target.[current] + 1
    WHEN NOT MATCHED THEN INSERT (name, [current]) VALUES (@name, 1)
OUTPUT
    INSERTED.[current];
END