Are GUID primary keys bad in theory, or just practice?

Posted by Yarin on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Yarin
Published on 2010-06-16T04:44:57Z Indexed on 2010/06/16 4:52 UTC
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sql

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database-design

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relational-database

Whenever I design a database I automatically start with an auto-generating GUID primary key for each of my tables (excepting look-up tables)

I know I'll never lose sleep over duplicate keys, merging tables, etc. To me it just makes sense philosophically that any given record should be unique across all domains, and that that uniqueness should be represented in a consistent way from table to table.

I realize it will never be the most performant option, but putting performance aside, I'd like to know if there are philosophical arguments against this practice?

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