May 31, 2007 at 9:02 am
Hi Everyone. I was wondering what the opinions were regarding the use of GUIDs vs IDENTITY as the table PK. Insert performance is top priority. I realize that generating GUIDs is expensive but for a multithreaded application I don’t suffer a serialization problem, one at a time, getting the next Identity value. Maybe the serialization problem doesn’t really exist because the value is generated directly at insert time?
Any thoughts appreciated.
May 31, 2007 at 9:22 am
Assuming the PK is also a clustered index, using a GUID will lead to a lot of page splits. It will also take 16 bytes in any indexes that reference it, instead of 4 for an int or 8 for a bigint (although that is more of a concern on read performance).
If you are doing all of the inserts as a batch, you could possibly generate an int key outside of SQL - although I don't know whether this would be quicker than an identity field. I would make life easier if you needed to know the key value for some other purpose though, as you wouldn't need to retrieve that value from SQL over and over.
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