Should I use int or GUID for primary key?

Should I use int or GUID for primary key?

int is smaller, faster, easy to remember, keeps a chronological sequence. And as for Guid , the only advantage I found is that it is unique. In which case a Guid would be better than and int and why? From what I’ve seen, int has no flaws except by the number limit, which in many cases are irrelevant.

Is GUID good for primary key?

GUIDs can be considered as global primary keys. Local primary keys are used to uniquely identify records within a table. On the other hand, GUIDs can be used to uniquely identify records across tables, databases, and servers.

What is best practice in defining primary key?

The primary key must uniquely identify each record. A record’s primary-key value can’t be null. The primary key-value must exist when the record is created. The primary key must remain stable—you can’t change the primary-key field(s).

How do you find the primary key of an identity?

The general rules I follow for identity and primary key are:

1. Always use an identity column.
2. Create the clustered index on the column or columns which are used in range lookups.
3. Keep the clustered index narrow since the clustered index is added to the end of every other index.

Can a GUID be an int?

GUID is 128 bit (16 bytes) data. To convert GUID to integer without data loss, we cannot use Int32 or Int64.

Is identity different from primary key?

An identity column differs from a primary key in that its values are managed by the server and usually cannot be modified. In many cases an identity column is used as a primary key; however, this is not always the case.

How do you set a primary key identity in SQL?

SQL PRIMARY KEY on ALTER TABLE. ADD CONSTRAINT PK_Person PRIMARY KEY (ID,LastName); Note: If you use ALTER TABLE to add a primary key, the primary key column(s) must have been declared to not contain NULL values (when the table was first created).

When to use GUID for identity / primary key?

A clustered index on identity column the table was causing latch contention, due to which I had to move clustered index to a candidate key. So, if the table is for OLTP purpose, I would suggest creating primary with non-clustered index & use GUID column for a clustered index.

Which is the best int identity for clustering tables?

Unless you have a very good reason, I would argue to use a INT IDENTITY for almost every “real” data table as the default for their primary key – it’s unique, it’s stable (never changes), it’s narrow, it’s ever increasing – all the good properties that you want to have in a clustering key for fast and reliable performance of your SQL Server tables!

Which is better an int or a GUID?

Typically, an INT with 2+ billion rows should be sufficient for the vast majority of tables – and compared to a GUID as the clustering key, you can save yourself hundreds of megabytes of storage on disk and in server memory. Quick calculation – using INT vs. GUID as Primary and Clustering Key:

Can a GUID be used as a clustering key?

GUIDs may seem to be a natural choice for your primary key – and if you really must, you could probably argue to use it for the PRIMARY KEY of the table. What I’d strongly recommend not to do is use the GUID column as the clustering key, which SQL Server does by default, unless you specifically tell it not to.

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