Hello,

I'm somewhat of a newbie and I need to create a view with a column
that is not derived from any other tables. What I want is for this
field to be an auto-increment field or some kind of UID. Can anyone
quickly tell me how to do this.

Here is my dilemma. I need to pull data from a unique data set from a
table which does not have a primary key, and none exists in its data.
Please tell me how to put this data in a view(or another table) so
that I can pull it out with unique records. It doesnt matter what the
unique field consists of.

Thanks

Add newid() to your select statement.

Select newid(),

This will create a UID for each line returned by the select statement.

margraft@yahoo.com wrote in message news:<1db47099.0411231136.50d722c7@posting.google. com>...
> Hello,
>
> I'm somewhat of a newbie and I need to create a view with a column
> that is not derived from any other tables. What I want is for this
> field to be an auto-increment field or some kind of UID. Can anyone
> quickly tell me how to do this.
>
> Here is my dilemma. I need to pull data from a unique data set from a
> table which does not have a primary key, and none exists in its data.
> Please tell me how to put this data in a view(or another table) so
> that I can pull it out with unique records. It doesnt matter what the
> unique field consists of.
>
> Thanks

> Select newid(),
>
> This will create a UID for each line returned by the select statement.

If you do twice the request, the UID wont be the same... So it removes a lot
of the interest of the UID. The best thing to do would ne to add a primary
key to the table...

--
Vincent

(margraft@yahoo.com) writes:
> I'm somewhat of a newbie and I need to create a view with a column
> that is not derived from any other tables. What I want is for this
> field to be an auto-increment field or some kind of UID. Can anyone
> quickly tell me how to do this.
>
> Here is my dilemma. I need to pull data from a unique data set from a
> table which does not have a primary key, and none exists in its data.
> Please tell me how to put this data in a view(or another table) so
> that I can pull it out with unique records. It doesnt matter what the
> unique field consists of.

Using newid() as Mike suggested will give you a 16-byte binary value,
which may be somewhat difficult to manage. But it's certainly the
easiest method.

If you want an integer number, the best is probably to write a multi-step
table function where you select the data into a table with an IDENTITY
column, and then return that table.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinf...2000/books.asp