title: Why does select SCOPE_IDENTITY() return a decimal instead of an integer?
body: <p>So I have a table with an identity column as the primary key, so it is an integer. So, why does <code>SCOPE_IDENTITY()</code> always return a decimal value instead of an int to my C# application? This is really annoying since decimal values will not implicitly convert to integers in C#, which means I now have to rewrite a bunch of stuff and have a lot of helper methods because I use SQL Server and Postgres, which Postgres does return an integer for the equivalent function..</p>
  
  <p>Why does <code>SCOPE_IDENTITY()</code> not just return a plain integer? Are there people out there that commonly use decimal/non-identity values for primary keys?</p>