David Johnson wrote:

>Sorry for the late response ...
>
>Why not use UUID (aka GUID in Windows). It's a recognized standard that is guaranteed to generate unique values across all machines in the world until the year 3040 AD from an OS level call. If you're using java then there are many open source native Java UUID generators out there. There have been other discussions of distributed keys in this forun recently where this was explored in more depth.
>
>This reduces you keying needs to (at worst) a single 38 byte column. Merging/replicating is simply a matter of copying records from the "source" table to the "target" table.
>
>This is exactly the sort of application that he UUID standard was written for.
>

Sounds good, but how exactly do I generate a GUID under Windows? Is
there an API call to make? If so, what is it?

Thanks!

Jonathan Neve.