Identity Column Benefits
Date: 2000/06/20
Message-ID: <8PL35.11$SE3.2482_at_typhoon2.ba-dsg.net>#1/1
Hello,
I've just taken over the management of a project and I'm a bit concerned
about one of the earlier design decisions that was made. We have
quotations, stories, poems, etc... stored in a table called "Content".
There are several tables hanging off of this main table such as
Thanks,
Alex
Received on Tue Jun 20 2000 - 00:00:00 CEST
"ContentSubject", "Subject", "ContentCategory", "Category". The primary key
on the Content table is a field of type varchar that is a unique index.
There is nothing special about this field's data, as it is only used as a
"handle" for the data. The DB we are using is SQL 7.0. My concern is that
I'm used to using the identity property for columns such as this, and I had
never given much thought to doing it any other way. The biggest benefit I
see is that the field is automatically incremented by the DB, rather than
having the developers do it through code. I'm not really looking to switch
to ID properties at this point, but I wanted to know if anyone out there had
any compelling reasons to switch perhaps based on performance of ID columns
when executing queries or joings, or simliar performance concerns with a
field of type varchar. Please let me know.