If your ID column on a table is a unique identifier (Guid), is there any point creating a clustered primary key on the ID column?
Given that they are globally unique, how would the sorting work?
If your ID column on a table is a unique identifier (Guid), is there any point creating a clustered primary key on the ID column?
Given that they are globally unique, how would the sorting work?
I strongly advise against using clustered Guid key... We had big performance issues on SQL server because of such poor design a few years ago.
Also check out: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/583001/improving-performance-of-cluster-index-guid-primary-key
GUIDs as they are are terrible for performance since they are effectively random values (this "breaks" clustered index), and they are awful for indexes, since less entries fit on a single page/extent (SQL Server terms). SQL Server 2005 introduces newsequentialid()
which helps solving first problem.
Putting a clustered index on a guid column is not such a good idea (unless you're making use of sequential guids).
The clustered index determines the physical order of how the records are stored.
This means that, if you put a clustered index on a column that does not sequentially grow, SQL Server will have some work making sure that the records are correctly ordered physically when you insert new records.
The idea of having a sorted index is very good in itself as searching then becomes very efficient.
The problem however is that in case of a GUID one never searches with "WHERE GUID = xyz". So the whole concept is wasted. So I would suggest to rather have a clustered index on a column which is used most often as a SARG to increase the query efficiency.