How to INSERT a row INTO a table that has an 'order' column without cursor I have a SQL Server 2016 table with an order/position column.  This column is an INT that indicates the preferred order/position of the rows in table for presentation purposes. 

How do I INSERT a row in position 1 without using a cursor?  (i.e. new row has position 1, existing rows - assumed to be in correct order before insert - must be "moved down") 

The order/position column is NOT NULL and enforced to be UNIQUE. I would also prefer not to use "blunt force" technique like set all rows' order/position value to some "never used" values and then just perform reorder on all rows.
I suppose you want something like this:

BEGIN TRANSACTION ;

    DECLARE @pos INT = 1 ;

    UPDATE tbl
    SET position = position + 1
    WHERE position &gt;= @pos
      AND EXISTS
          (SELECT * FROM tbl WHERE position = @pos) ;

    INSERT INTO tbl
      (&lt;column names&gt;, position)
    VALUES
      (&lt;values ...&gt;, @pos) ;

COMMIT TRANSACTION ;


Note that this design will behave highly inefficiently, if you have often inserts. It will essentially update almost the entire table for every new insert!