patrickmcginnis59 10839 (8/29/2014)
CELKO (8/22/2014)
What do you use for the PK on lookup tables?
I use the encoding that is being used. The IDENTITY property (not a column!) is the count of insertion attempts that was made to that disk on that one machine.
Colums with the IDENTITY property can be per table, and you can have the same value for columns with the identity property in separate tables, so at best it would be the count of insertion attempts that were made to that TABLE.
If you want to be really technical, it's not even that. Some identity values can be discarded without a corresponding INSERT attempt, so it's not a true "count" of those. It's just an arbitrary identifier ... which is ok, because that's all that's needed!
Now, it's far too often used as a clustering key when it should not be, but it can still be useful as a pk or other unique identifier of a table row.
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