Question

I just started working with SQL Server and I have some troubles with adding values to a table with a column of type uniqueidentifier.

The table consists of:

ID (uniqueidentifier), CODE (nchar(5)), COUNTRY_CODE(nchar(2)), NAME(nchar30)  

I tried adding values from Excel and CSV files, basically they look like this:

DEBE,DE,Berlin

I could not load it, always have some errors with this ID field.

When i try to add values manually like:

INSERT INTO [Portfolio].[dbo].[Regions](CODE, COUNTRY_CODE, NAME) 
VALUES ('DEBE', 'DE', 'Berlin');

It says:

Cannot insert the value NULL into column ‘ID’, table
‘Portfolio.dbo.Regions’; column does not allow nulls. INSERT fails.

Of course when I add an id column and a number, I get info that int is incompatible with uniqueidentifier.

I even tried creating a temp table (with id as an INT instead of uniqueidentifier) and copying values from it into this (without ID column, its supposed to generate automatically)

Only thing I can think of is that ID column is not creating values for it automatically and I don’t know how to solve this. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Uniqueidentifier is a special type you can use to generate GUID. Is 16 byte long and is not incremented automatically as the Identity columns. You need to use Convert or Cast clause in order to get the correct uniqueidentifier from a varchar, if it exceeds the 16bytes it will be truncated.

Use NewID() to generate a new uniqueidentifier.

Maybe this link can help you