Question

Is there a way to obtain a unique database identifier (such as a GUID) from a SQL 2005 database?

I found this article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.sqlserver.management.smo.database.databaseguid%28v=sql.90%29.aspx

However, I need to be able to obtain the DatabaseGuid from T-SQL instead of VB.

EDIT: I am trying to uniquely determine the database for which I am connected. Through code I manually sync records between SQL Compact and SQL Server. Right now my users are in a test environment and when they are pointed to production SQL in the future I will need to re-sync entire tables instead of relying on rowversion. The rowversions will be different on the production server and if I am able to detect a database GUID change, I can re-sync the entire table.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Whatever means SMO uses to get the database guid, you should be able to do the same. If you have problems figuring out what is SMO doing, you can use profiler to monitor what t executes and figure it out.

In this case probably SMO reads the database_guid value from sys.database_recovery_status:

Used to relate all the database files of a database together. All
files must have this GUID in their header page for the database to
start as expected. Only one database should ever have this GUID, but
duplicates can be created by copying and attaching databases. RESTORE
always generates a new GUID when you restore a database that does not
yet exist.