What is the idiomatic solution in SQL Server for reserving a block of ids for use in a bulk insert?

Question

I have a table with an identity column and I want to reserve a block of ids which I can use for bulk inserting, whilst allowing inserts to still happen into that table.

Note this is part of a bulk insert of several tables, where those other tables relate to these ids via an FK. Therefore I need to block them out so I can prepare the relationships beforehand.

I've found a solution which works by taking a lock on the table in a transaction and then does the reseeding (which is pretty fast). But it looks a bit hacky to me - is there a generally accepted pattern for doing this?

create table dbo.test
(
    id bigint not null primary key identity(1,1),
    SomeColumn nvarchar(100) not null
)

Here's the code to block out (make room for) some ids:

declare @numRowsToMakeRoomFor int = 100

BEGIN TRANSACTION;

        SELECT  MAX(Id) FROM dbo.test WITH (  XLOCK, TABLOCK ) -- will exclusively lock the table whilst this tran is in progress, 
        --another instance of this query will not be able to pass this line until this instance commits

        --get the next id in the block to reserve
        DECLARE @firstId BIGINT = (SELECT IDENT_CURRENT( 'dbo.test' )  +1);

        --calculate the block range
        DECLARE @lastId BIGINT = @firstId + (@numRowsToMakeRoomFor -1);

        --reseed the table
        DBCC CHECKIDENT ('dbo.test',RESEED, @lastId);

COMMIT TRANSACTION;    

select @firstId;

My code is batch processing blocks of data in chunks of about 1000. I have about a billion rows to insert in total. Everything is working fine - the database isn't the bottle neck, the batch processing itself is computationally expensive and requires me to add a couple of servers to run in parallel, so I need to accommodate more than one process "batch inserting" at the same time.

Answer 1

You can use procedure (introduced in SQL Server 2012):
sp_sequence_get_range

To use it you need to create a SEQUENCE object and use it as a default value instead of IDENTITY column.

There is an example:

CREATE SCHEMA Test ;  
GO  

CREATE SEQUENCE Test.RangeSeq  
    AS int   
    START WITH 1  
    INCREMENT BY 1  
    CACHE 10  
;

CREATE TABLE Test.ProcessEvents  
(  
    EventID int PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED   
        DEFAULT (NEXT VALUE FOR Test.RangeSeq),  
    EventTime datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT (getdate()),  
    EventCode nvarchar(5) NOT NULL,  
    Description nvarchar(300) NULL  
) ;


DECLARE 
   @range_first_value_output sql_variant ;  

EXEC sp_sequence_get_range  
@sequence_name = N'Test.RangeSeq'  
, @range_size = 4  
, @range_first_value = @range_first_value_output OUTPUT ;

SELECT @range_first_value_output; 

Documentation: sp_sequence_get_range