Primary Keys: IDs versus GUIDs

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 5:00 AM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Developers | Comments: 0 | View blog reactions

Every wonder if you should create primary keys in a database as IDs or GUIDs?

Developers share a lot of building duties when building applications for users including create database structures.

If you've been building databases for a while, you may run across developers who create primary keys as IDs or GUIDs, but which is better?

Jeff Atwood on my favorite blog, Coding Horror, talks about which is better to use for primary keys: IDs or GUIDs. Personally, I've been using IDs for the longest time and been on the fence about GUIDs for a while. As stated in the post, It is 16 bytes and I've been talked to about it by DBAs before because it was taking up a lot of space.

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