Hi All,

I am building an application which has a copy of the application installed at each of the companies branches, each with their own database. Data is moved to a central server and stored in a single database.

At the moment I am using a natural key, with the high order key being the Branch Number. I'd like to switch to artificial keys. Is there any relatively simple way of ensuring that each branch entry to a table will be unique across all branches?

PS: This is my first post, I started using Hibernate last week to replace my own 'roll your own' DAO approach and I am blown away, this is open source dev at its finest!

You may want to look at using GUIDs, they'll be unique but I'm not sure what type of perfomance hit you might take on using a 32 character varchar.