What are the best practices for using a GUID as a primary key, specifically regarding performance?

Question

I have an application that uses GUID as the Primary Key in almost all tables and I have read that there are issues about performance when using GUID as Primary Key. Honestly

Answer 1

I've been using GUIDs as PKs since 2005. In this distributed database world, it is absolutely the best way to merge distributed data. You can fire and forget merge tables without all the worry of ints matching across joined tables. GUIDs joins can be copied without any worry.

This is my setup for using GUIDs:

1. PK = GUID. GUIDs are indexed similar to strings, so high row tables (over 50 million records) may need table partitioning or other performance techniques. SQL Server is getting extremely efficient, so performance concerns are less and less applicable.

2. PK Guid is NON-Clustered index. Never cluster index a GUID unless it is NewSequentialID. But even then, a server reboot will cause major breaks in ordering.

3. Add ClusterID Int to every table. This is your CLUSTERED Index... that orders your table.

4. Joining on ClusterIDs (int) is more efficient, but I work with 20-30 million record tables, so joining on GUIDs doesn't visibly affect performance. If you want max performance, use the ClusterID concept as your primary key & join on ClusterID.

Here is my Email table...

CREATE TABLE [Core].[Email] (
    [EmailID]      UNIQUEIDENTIFIER CONSTRAINT [DF_Email_EmailID] DEFAULT (newsequentialid()) NOT NULL,        
    [EmailAddress] NVARCHAR (50)    CONSTRAINT [DF_Email_EmailAddress] DEFAULT ('') NOT NULL,        
    [CreatedDate]  DATETIME         CONSTRAINT [DF_Email_CreatedDate] DEFAULT (getutcdate()) NOT NULL,      
    [ClusterID] INT NOT NULL IDENTITY,
    CONSTRAINT [PK_Email] PRIMARY KEY NonCLUSTERED ([EmailID] ASC)
);
GO

CREATE UNIQUE CLUSTERED INDEX [IX_Email_ClusterID] ON [Core].[Email] ([ClusterID])
GO

CREATE UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX_Email_EmailAddress] ON [Core].[Email] ([EmailAddress] Asc)