I am working on an ordering system, and for the orders table, I didn't want the order ID to start with 1 and auto increment as they are placed. Instead I was going to randomly generate an ID for each order placed, such as: 3029491.

Would there be an inherient problems to doing such a thing? Is it unwise to do it? Should I still have the ID auto increment and just have another column be an random ID column? Either way, it will always be unique.

Thanks!

other than that you have to have code in case the random number generates an existing number (so just generate another one), no

Until SQL 6.5, random distribution was actively encouraged (this is part of what made GUID values popular). Before you "burn daylight" on finding a mangable solution, I'd suggest that you at least investigate using GUIDs instead of recreating them.

-PatP