autonumbering?

Hello

First post to this forum.

My question: I'm sure I read somewhere that ideally you shouldn't use the auto-increment facility in a table's id field but should generate you're own when you insert. Does this make any sense to anyone or is it just some rubbish I read online somewhere.

Any thoughts appreciated.

zingit's rubbish, sorry to say

go ahead and use IDENTITY, lots of people do|||Hello

First post to this forum.

My question: I'm sure I read somewhere that ideally you shouldn't use the auto-increment facility in a table's id field but should generate you're own when you insert. Does this make any sense to anyone or is it just some rubbish I read online somewhere.

Any thoughts appreciated.

zing

The only problem you'll have is if you want to copy the data from the one server to another i.e moving from development to production or whatever, as your id's will be reset to match the current counter in the target table.|||Hello

First post to this forum.

My question: I'm sure I read somewhere that ideally you shouldn't use the auto-increment facility in a table's id field but should generate you're own when you insert. Does this make any sense to anyone or is it just some rubbish I read online somewhere.

Any thoughts appreciated.

zing
Read up in Books Online about IDENTITY values and GUIDs (globally unique identifiers). You will find that each has advantages and disadvantages in different situations. IDENTITY columns should not be generated outside the database layer, but GUIDs can be generated at any layer of the application and there are some occasions when this is advantageous.|||Another issue that is sometimes a problem is that IDENTITY values are guaranteed to be unique. That does not mean (in fact it nearly prohibits) them from being sequential. Any ROLLBACK or DELETE operation leaves gaps in the numbering. This isn't a problem for code that needs a unique, consistantly ascending or descending number sequence, but it is a serious problem for poorly written code that demands a contiguous sequence.

I'll also second Blindman's notiion of giving GUID values consideration. They tend to either expose or fix many of the problems I've seen caused by poor use of sequences.

-PatP