The Cost of GUIDs as Primary Keys

By Bill Graziano on 08 January 2005 | 2 Comments | Tags: Data Types, Indexes


Kristen submitted "In this article, Jimmy Nilsson presents the pros and cons of using globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) as the datatype for primary keys in SQL Server 2000. In doing so, he shows you test results that hint of performance characteristics and introduces you to a special type of GUID that he invented, called COMBs, that solves what otherwise might give you a big throughput problem.

He also point out that GUIDs are not guaranteed to be 'Globally Unique'"
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