Hi Noonie Thanks for that info,
I have hundreds of thousands of records in some of my tables and have been very happy with identity integers as primary keys so far. Kirsten _____ From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of noonie Sent: Saturday, 4 February 2012 12:05 PM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: Making an application that uses identity keys occassionallyconnected Hi Kirsten, >From my experience, using GUIDs as surrogate primary keys works fine in development where sample data is only thousands of rows. It bites viciously in production where we have millions of rows and deep dependencies. Int keys are still surrogate keys but seem to offer better performance. How you do this will depend on what your occasionally connected applications are connecting to. If it is a reporting database that consolidates data from different sites then your solution would be simpler than where it shared the information across all the remote sites. All the suggestions mentioned, in this thread, are viable. I have used two-part keys (e.g site-id, item-id) in the past to good effect. More recently we have added non-key GUIDs for the central database to verify equality and, as we don't redistribute all the data to the remote databases, it's only used as a tie-breaker. The solution you choose will depend on the nature of the application and how much sync code you are willing to write. If you use a framework you are as much constrained by its limitations as you are freed from having to write code :-( -- Regards, noonie On 2 February 2012 07:51, Kirsten Greed <kirst...@jobtalk.com.au> wrote: Hi All I am interested in making my application occasionally connected. My app uses SQL Server and the tables have identity keys (auto incrementing numbers) I can see this will be a problem if I have 2 databases on separate computers because they will both want to assign a new record to the same key. Indeed when I experimented with Microsoft Sync Framework 2, this is what happened. Any advice on a strategy forward? Thanks Kirsten
