Question

I am looking for a better primary key than the autonumber data type, namely for the reason that it’s limited to a long integer, when I really just need the field to reflect a number or text string that will never ever repeat, no matter HOW many records are added or deleted from the table. The problem is I am not sure how to implement something like turning the current date and time into a hexadecimal string and using that as a unique field I can use as a primary key.

Am I just being too paranoid about running out of space?

— EDITED 03-16-2010 @ 1237 hours —

I had a person who, at the time, I thought was a wonderful reference for Access related questions tell me that Replication IDs are just a counter for the number of times an item was replicated… hence I never explored it further. After the number of replies, I have up-modded, and accepted an answer. I guess I was just having a stupid newbie Accesss developer moment. Seriously though, thank you again for everyone who replied!

Answer 1

GUID.
They are pretty unique

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_Unique_Identifier

You did not mention your programming language.
C# would be something like

String myKey = Guid.NewGuid().toString();