Tag Archives: Primary Keys

GUID vs Auto Increment INT as Database Primary Keys

Seems like having a random primary key like GUID affects database peformance.  See here and here for SQL Server and here for My SQL. Main reasons are: Affects physical row orders and as because of its randomness, it affects fragmentation and database size. Affects lookups for joins Key size: 4 bytes compared to 16 For example: I have a real [...]