>>>I can't think of a good reason to use a character data-type for a surrogate primary key. The integer data-type seems particularly well suited for surrogate primary keys, and you can always STR it if you need to concatenate it with another field. Using the STR of a numeric value for the key itself seems like unnecessary overhead.
>>
>>Then, what about using GUID ? It's character type and it's BIG - 38 char long...
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>Nick,
>
>Nope, a GUID is a 16 byte integer. From the Platform SDK - COM:
>
>"CoCreateGuid - Creates a GUID, a unique 128-bit integer used for CLSIDs and interface identifiers."

I mean the actual value which is returned from the function posted in
John Koziol's message
Re: Uniqueness of Indexes - how do you handle this? Thread#376137 Message#380129