Better alternative to autonumber primary keys

Posted by Comrad_Durandal on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Comrad_Durandal
Published on 2010-03-15T05:06:49Z Indexed on 2010/03/15 5:09 UTC
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Filed under:

ms-access

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database-design

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primary-key

I am looking for a better primary key than the autonumber data type, namely for the reason that it's limited to a long integer, when I really just need the field to reflect a number or text string that will never ever repeat, no matter HOW many records are added or deleted from the table. The problem is I am not sure how to implement something like turning the current date and time into a hexadecimal string and using that as a unique field I can use as a primary key.

Am I just being too paranoid about running out of space?

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