Suggestion for generating unique identifier.

Anyone have any suggestions for generating a unique identifier for a DB
column. I don't want to use an IDENTITY column because two seperate tables
will have PK columns that cannot have duplicate key values amongst the
tables. I thought about something to do with Date/Time. It can be any
datatype for that matter, it does not have to be an int type. I just need
something to uniquely identify records from two seperate tables.
Thanks
Marty UMarty U. <Marty U.@.discussions.microsoft.com> typed:
> Anyone have any suggestions for generating a unique identifier for a
> DB column. I don't want to use an IDENTITY column because two
> seperate tables will have PK columns that cannot have duplicate key
> values amongst the tables. I thought about something to do with
> Date/Time. It can be any datatype for that matter, it does not have
> to be an int type. I just need something to uniquely identify records
> from two seperate tables.
> Thanks
> Marty U
You could use a GUID. In C#:
string myGuid = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
Davide Vernole
MVP ASP/ASP.NET
Microsoft Certified Solution Developer
GUID
SQL Server datatype "uniqueidentifier"
Greg
"Marty U." <Marty U.@.discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:D6C67BD9-3AA6-4125-9F4D-E16C63E94A89@.microsoft.com...
> Anyone have any suggestions for generating a unique identifier for a DB
> column. I don't want to use an IDENTITY column because two seperate tables
> will have PK columns that cannot have duplicate key values amongst the
> tables. I thought about something to do with Date/Time. It can be any
> datatype for that matter, it does not have to be an int type. I just need
> something to uniquely identify records from two seperate tables.
> Thanks
> Marty U
Marty U. wrote:
> Anyone have any suggestions for generating a unique identifier for a DB
> column. I don't want to use an IDENTITY column because two seperate tables
> will have PK columns that cannot have duplicate key values amongst the
> tables. I thought about something to do with Date/Time. It can be any
> datatype for that matter, it does not have to be an int type. I just need
> something to uniquely identify records from two seperate tables.
>
GUIDs are often used for that:
Guid id = Guid.NewGuid();
this corresponds to SQL Server's UniqueIdentifier type.
The SQL server can generate one using the NEWID() function - you can set
the column's default value to NEWID() to have the GUID generated
automatically for new records.
mikeb