How can I retrieve the identities of rows that were inserted through insert…select?

Question

I am inserting records through a query similar to this one:

insert into tbl_xyz select field1 from tbl_abc

Now I would like to retreive th

Answer 1

As far as I know, you can't really do this with straight SQL in the same script. But you could create an INSERT trigger. Now, I hate triggers, but it's one way of doing it.

Depending on what you are trying to do, you might want to insert the rows into a temp table or table variable first, and deal with the result set that way. Hopefully, there is a unique column that you can link to.

You could also lock the table, get the max key, insert your rows, and then get your max key again and do a range.

Trigger:

--Use the Inserted table.  This conaints all of the inserted rows.
SELECT * FROM Inserted

Temp Table:

insert field1, unique_col into #temp from tbl_abc

insert into tbl_xyz (field1, unique_col) select field1, unique_col from tbl_abc

--This could be an update, or a cursor, or whatever you want to do
SELECT * FROM tbl_xyz WHERE EXISTS (SELECT top 1 unique_col FROM #temp WHERE unique_col = tbl_xyz.unique_col)

Key Range:

Declare @minkey as int, @maxkey as int

BEGIN TRANS --You have to lock the table for this to work

  --key is the name of your identity column
  SELECT @minkey = MAX(key) FROM tbl_xyz
  insert into tbl_xyz select field1 from tbl_abc
  SELECT @maxkey = MAX(key) FROM tbl_xyz

COMMIT Trans

SELECT * FROM tbl_xyz WHERE key BETWEEN @minkey and @maxkey