SQL Snippet: Generate GUID

Microsoft SQL ServerIf you’ve been following this blog, you’ll know that I write a fair bit of SQL. I’m going to post some small snippets of SQL which I had to work out how to accomplish a small task as part of a larger script.

This fourth example is going to be, by far, the shortest pioece of SQL I post. It shows how to return new GUID:

/*
Created by Ian Grieve of azurecurve|Ramblings of a Dynamics GP Consultant (https://www.azurecurve.co.uk)
This code is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 UK).
*/
SELECT NEWID()

I discovered this function when looking for a way to generate new GUIDs for a large Workflow implementation for a client where we are insertin the workflow steps via SQL rather than through the UI. This is very much not the recommended way of creating a workflow process, but the approval requirements resulted in a very large number of workflow steps and tackling it in this way, saved us a large amount of time.