(SQL) Identity Crisis

Well, crisis somewhat averted, but I'm having an issue with an identity field in a SQL created file.

Here's an excerpt from the table definition:
EditID Dec (10, 0) NOT NULL GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY
(START WITH 1 INCREMENT BY 1 CYCLE),
Primary Key(EditID)

The file was created last October and has been fine all along. Today we added a new field to the file and recreated the table. We copied the old records in, and they retained their EditID values, so that was great. However, the moment a record was added, it attempted to start at 1 again and got a duplicate record error. Crap! To get around the issue, for the time being, I modified the EditID definition to "START WITH 8060." We're off and running again.

For every change to the file will the "START WITH" have to be modified? Is there another way to get around this issue?

I have a feeling the answer might be to use ALTER TABLE instead of recreating the file. It's not that I'm against that, it's just that I'm already introducing a lot of change (new stuff) here, and I don't want that bubble to burst. In addition, we don't have change management software (sigh), so I ended up creating a system to implement files across all of our clients' libraries. To have to redesign it to know if the RUNSQLSTM it runs is executing a CREATE or an ALTER is a big deal.

I appreciate any input.

We're on IBM i 7.1.

Thanks,
Kurt Anderson
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
CustomCall Data Systems, a division of Enghouse Systems Ltd.