Well, how do I find out what that ID is?  In a multiuser environment, it is
not possible to simply select the highest ID, because when two users who
insert a new record at the same time, it is impossible to distinguish the two
newly inserted records.  Both users will believe that the highest record is
theirs, when in fact only one user actually owns the last record, and the
other users owns the next-to-last record.

It seems like I need something like a cursor, but I'm not sure how to
implement such a thing.  Keep in mind that this is a problem in almost ALL of
my talbes, since most use a trigger of this sort, so I need a generic
solution, not a one-time fix for just this table.

Thanks in advance...

Joel

A common way to do this is to have a separate table to hold the 'next
id'. Your 'insert ' trigger updates the ID value to current value +
increment value (depending on your SQL server it can be efficient in
I/O terms to use an increment of greater than 1).

You'll find good discussions on these types of issue in
comp.lang.databases.theory plus the sybase/sql server newsgroups.

There are several good books on physical database design around but
I'd reccomend you pick one that is specific to the version of SQL
Server you are using.