If you have STR(myfiedl, 6) somewhere in your code, it will return '******' in case when value exceeds 6 digits (INT).

>I didn't know that NUMERIC can be Identity. I actually need only 4 or 5 digits at the most for this column (the numbers never will go > 10000). Thank you very much.
>
>But what I am not clear is about converting to string. I thought you could use STR() function on either INT or NUMERIC field. Am I wrong?
>
>>First, there's no requirement for Identity column in MS SQL Server to be an integer. It can be INT, BIGINT, SMALLINT, TINYINT, DECIMAL or NUMERIC.
>>INT has more digits (10) . The only place where it could make a difference, is you convert it to a string.
>>