Relational Databases 101—Using Identity or GUID Primary Keys

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Using Identity or GUID Primary Keys

Virtually all of the databases I work with use a system-generated "identity" column or a globally unique identifier (GUID) (using the uniqueidentifier datatype) as the primary key in each table. For now, let's consider use of identity or GUID columns as the best choice for your primary key. What's the difference between the two? Well, the identity column is an integer that's generated for you by the server (and guaranteed to be unique in the scope of the table), and the GUID is a unique string that you ask the system to generate in code. It's also guaranteed to be unique, but globally (all over the world). Each of these primary keys has issues when it comes to using them in ADO.NET. Unique identifiers also have an impact on your design as well. Consider these points:

• An identity column (integer) can be inspected, selected, or entered by your application's user far easier than a GUID. If you plan to let the user enter (I frown on this) or choose a PK from a list, you'll find that GUIDs are very hard to enter (correctly) and just as hard to pick from a list.

• If your data is spread out over a number of servers, the GUID is the best choice. That's because you can be guaranteed that the number generated in the remote site will be different from those generated locally or from other remote sites.

• GUIDs tend to spread out the index values more than integer identity values so data can be distributed more evenly across data pages. However, "sequential" retrieval is more expensive.

• The GUID is a far larger value, which is somewhat more expensive to store and manage in memory.

• You can use the NEWID TSQL function or .NET functions to set or initialize a GUID. Note that you won't get the same value twice.

• You can also create your own GUID string, as long as it's in the format (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx, in which each x is a hexadecimal digit in the range 0–9 or A–F). For example, 6F9619FF-8B86-D011-B42D-00C04FC964FF is a valid uniqueidentifier value.

• You can use the SCOPE_IDENTITY(), @@Identity, or other TSQL commands/functions to fetch the most recently created identity value to pass back to your client. I discuss these functions in Chapter 13 and show how to use them with an ADO.NET Update.

• Identity column values can also be set manually, and you can set the autoincrement and seed (starting) value in code. You can also use this technique to manage client-side identity values that need to tie parent and child tables together relationally but still be able to permit the server to generate "actual" identity values when you post data to the database.