GUID Vs Int data type as primary key

Recently one of my friend ask me when I should go for GUID and When I should go for Int as primary key in table. So decided to write a blog post for it. Here are advantages and disadvantage of the GUID and INT.

INT Data Type:

Advantages:

• Its required small space in terms of the storage it will only allocates 4 bytes to store data.
• Insert and update performance will be faster then the GUID. It will increase the performance of the application.
• Easy to index and Join will give best performance with the integer.
• Easy to understand and remember
• Support of function that will give last value generated like Scope_Indentity()

Disadvantages:

• If you are going to merge table frequently then there may be a chance to duplicated primary key.
• Limited range of uniqueness if you are going to store lots of data then it may be chance to run out of storage for INT data type.
• Hard to work with distributed tables.

GUID Data Type:

Advantages:

• It is unique for the current domains. For primary key is uniquely identifies the table.
• Less chances of for duplication.
• Suitable for inserting and updating large amount of data.
• Easy for merging data across servers.

Disadvantages:

Read more: DotNetJaps

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