Auto Generate AlphaNumeric ID’s in a SQL Server Table

Auto Generate AlphaNumeric ID’s in a SQL Server Table: "

I was recently working on a query to auto generate a Column ID based on an IDENTITY column. I used computed columns to achieve this. If you too have a similar requirement, then here’s the query.

DECLARE @TT TABLE (
CandID as 'C-' + RIGHT('000' + CONVERT(varchar, CourseID),5),
CourseID int IDENTITY(1,1),
ReferrerName varchar(10)
)

INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ('Dhiraj')
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ('Jack')
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ('Kelly')
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ('Kelly')
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ('Jack')
INSERT INTO @TT VALUES ('Dhiraj')

SELECT * FROM @TT

OUTPUT

Observe how the values of the CandID column are autogenerated based on the values if the CourseID column.

How to Generating Unique Identifire in SQL Server

We often find ourselves in the need of generating unique numbers in our database applications.

Let us quickly take a tour of how to do that using Sql server 2005.

SQL Server contains the NEWID() function. This function creates a unique value of type uniqueidentifier. We can use this function in several ways to generate unique numbers to suit our requirements :

Generate GUID's :

UniqueIndentifiers are also knows as GUID's. To generate a GUID use :

SELECT NEWID() as Guid

generates e00ab1d2-7484-410b-a55a-bcfa131a727e on my machine

Generate only digits :

SELECT ABS(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS VARBINARY(5)) AS Bigint)) as UniqueNo

generates 427357674589

Generate fixed digit unique numbers :

At times, we may also need to generate fixed digit numbers. You can do that in the following manner :

SELECT REPLACE(STR(CAST(CAST(NEWID() AS binary(5)) AS bigint),12),0,0)