Criteria

GUIDs

Seq. GUIDs

BIGINT

INT

Storage

16 bytes

16 bytes

8 bytes

4 bytes

Insert/Update performance

Slowest

Comparable but the index keys are larger in size. For wider tables, this would be slower than Integer values.

Faster than sequential GUIDs

Fastest

Hotspot contention

Very rare

Yes

Yes

Highest, due to smaller size of RIDs

Fragmentation/Page Splits

High

Minimal

Minimal

Minimal

JOIN Performance/SORT operations

Least performance

(Rank 4 = Least performance)

Better than random GUIDs due lesser fragmentation (Rank: 3)

High performance (Rank: 2)

High

Performance

(Rank: 1)

Logical reads

Rank 4=Highest

Rank 3

Rank 2

Rank 1=Least

Merging data across servers

Beneficial

Beneficial

Difficult

Difficult

Uniqueness

Rare chance of duplicates

Globally unique. Virtually no chance of collisions

Limited by range of BIGINT

Limited by range of INT