---
title: Activate Job IDs not increasing sequentially in SQL Server 2012.
slug: activate-job-ids-not-increasing-sequentially-in-sql-server-2012
createdAt: 2025-06-11T20:26:21.330Z
---

## Issue

Job IDs of two subsequent jobs increases by 1000 or more, skipping the IDs in between.  In normal operation subsequent Activate Job IDs will increment by 1.  This may affect ID generation in other tables as well.

## Description

Activate Job ID column uses the SQL identity specification to generate new job IDs.  When a new job is created SQL is responsible for allocating the ID to the job.   In SQL Server 2012 changes were made to how identity columns work, specifically in the caching of sequences.  This resulted in behaviour where the identity columns may jump by 1000 or more IDs on a server reboot.  See the following posts for more information on this issue:

 [http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/c55cb12a-3c8c-4e0b-a539-1bfc4092f54d/deprecation-of-trace-t272](http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/c55cb12a-3c8c-4e0b-a539-1bfc4092f54d/deprecation-of-trace-t272)

 [http://www.big.info/2013/01/how-to-solve-sql-server-2012-identity.html](http://www.big.info/2013/01/how-to-solve-sql-server-2012-identity.html)

 [http://jamessql.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/gap-issue-in-sql-server-2012-identity.html](http://jamessql.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/gap-issue-in-sql-server-2012-identity.html)

## Solution


To use the same identity generation semantics as previous versions of SQL you can use trace flag 272.  See the above articles on steps to configure this.