Thank you for your reply Michael.

I am thinking through PKs for a school administration system targeted at a school system. Since school data may be moved among different databases it is important that PKs be unique across the system.

Besides PKs that consist of two fields (one of which could be an identity field), a way to achieve this is by single field PKs that contain two parts: a high part, which may be the school code or a code indicating the site (database) where it was originally created, and a sequential part. This led to the question I asked.

How would a UDF work in SQL Server? What other alternatives do you suggest?

I appreciate your intput.

Alex


>You cannot set the default to be the return value of a stored procedure. In fact, the convention is that the return value of the stored procedure should reflect the status of the stored procedure's execution.
>
>A User Defined Function might work, although I've never tried it.
>
>Is there any reason that you're not using IDENTITY values for your PKs?
>
>-Mike
>
>>Hi,
>>
>>In SQL Server, is it possible to define the default of a field to be the return value of a stored procedure? For example how can I say that the default value of field CustomerPK is SP_MyNewId().
>>
>>TIA,
>>
>>Alex