[font="Verdana"]For a real world scenario, can I suggest you consider world-wide logistics? Say you have sites around the world generating shipping bills (bills of lading?), but you want to...

[font="Verdana"]Why did I recommend GUIDs?

A few years back I was involved in a project that had to synchronise data from multiple sources into one source. The sources were mobile...

[font="Verdana"]True. But neither will server names.

As for what...

[font="Verdana"]Nice! Although you're missing a comma after the path('') :-D[/font]

foxjazz (3/19/2009)

---

As far as the varchar(50) pk numbers, there is no other way to do it.

We do it by computername for a reason, our sync processes depend on that data...

Sergiy (3/19/2009)[hrInvoice numbers, parts, organizations, humans names, etc. - they are all from another world, they are not parts of data model.

They should be originated from a specific source, built...

Greg Snidow (3/19/2009)

---

Do you know of any good references to learn more about what you are saying? I have a VARCHAR(20) column as the PK for many of my...

[font="Verdana"]One common business case for generating sequences is for invoice numbers. For some reason, customers like to see their invoice numbers being counted just for them. So invoice...

[font="Verdana"]Yeah, not one of Eric's better moments.[/font]

[font="Verdana"]Well, it worked. It wasn't terribly quick though. And nor was it dynamic. I had to do a...

[font="Verdana"]Thanks folks! Would you believe I was doing this sort of thing with a pivot? :blush:[/font]

[font="Verdana"]Snort![/font]

[font="Verdana"]Yeah, I did that stuff 20 years ago when I built a compiler. Gotten a bit rusty on the details since then.

I wouldn't build one in SQL! However,...

[font="Verdana"]I learned these things as "Finite State Machines", or in general, Finite State Automata. Very cool. 😀

I've always recommended to people that if they are doing a lot...

[font="Verdana"]Yes, you have had a look at SOUNDEX() (and DIFFERENCE()) :-D[/font]