Introduction
Default values
How to auto-generate values in a database
Summary
Instruction
Nicely done! IDENTITY is not the only way to generate unique values; we also have the NEWID() function. Look at the example below:
SELECT NEWID();
You can use this function in the SELECT statement to get a unique, auto-generated value. NEWID doesn't take any arguments and returns only uniqueidentifier data. The uniqueidentifier data type is a global unique identifier (GUID), which is a long string, that looks something like this:
86E82700-7C7B-4256-950E-8423C0E32977
Each invocation of the NEWID() function generates a new, different GUID.
Exercise
Run a query that generates a GUID using the NEWID() function.
