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Are there any repercussions using Negative Primary Keys for tables (Identity Increment -1, Identity Seed -1 in SQL Server 2005)?
The reason for this is we’re creating a new database to replace an existing one. There are similar tables between the two databases and we’d like the “source” of the information to be transparent to our applications. The approach is to create views that unions tables from both databases. Negative PKs ensures the identities don’t overlap.
Like others have said, the database is fine with this.
But it would be a problems for a .NET application that uses DataSet+DataAdapter as they use negative keys as temporaries for new records.
Other data-access layers may use similar tricks.