So I saw this article the other day that talked about using identities in the database. One snippet of code in the article was supposed to find tables with identity columns. I saw two key issues with this code:

1. The code referenced system tables. If at all possible, one should avoid system tables references in favor of the Information Schema views.
2. The code didn't account for object ownership (schema). If two or more different users had an object with the same name (Jane.SomeTable, John.SomeTable, dbo.SomeTable), then the owner information needs to be specified when using functions like IDENT_CURRENT and OBJECT_ID and when joining the Information Schema Tables and Columns views.

So, being the geek that I am, I felt compelled to write this more complete version of that code that does in fact use the Information Schema views and handles object ownership:

SELECT T.TABLE_SCHEMA, T.TABLE_NAME, C.COLUMN_NAME, C.DATA_TYPE,
       IDENT_CURRENT(T.TABLE_SCHEMA + '.' + T.TABLE_NAME) [CURRENT_IDENTITY_VALUE]
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES AS T (NOLOCK)
        INNER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS AS C (NOLOCK)
        ON C.TABLE_SCHEMA = T.TABLE_SCHEMA AND C.TABLE_NAME = T.TABLE_NAME
WHERE T.TABLE_TYPE = 'BASE TABLE'
 AND  COLUMNPROPERTY (OBJECT_ID(T.TABLE_SCHEMA + '.' + T.TABLE_NAME),
                      C.COLUMN_NAME, 'IsIdentity') = 1
ORDER BY T.TABLE_SCHEMA, T.TABLE_NAME, C.COLUMN_NAME

--Peter