>I think of a customer entered key, much as I would a first name. Good information, but not something you can rely on. Useful for searches, but not a guarentee to find what you are looking for. I use GUIDs for my pk's. Love them.
GUIDs of course solve the problem of creating PKs for computers which are not always connected. I was thinking about the following alternative, but never actually tried it: assign each branch office a different number, and create PKs like:
bintoc(branchnum, 2) + bintoc(SerialNumber("TableName"))... where SerialNumber() gets a sequential number from a special table.
This would use 6 bytes, instead of the 16 used by the GUID. Any opinions?
Difference in opinions hath cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire... (from Gulliver's Travels)
