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We use Guids as primary keys for entities in the database. Traditionally, we've followed a pattern of letting the database set the ID for an entity during the INSERT, I think mostly because this is typically how you'd handle things using an auto-increment field or whatever. I'm finding more and more that it's a lot handier to do key assignment in code during object construction, for two main reasons: you know that once an object's constructor has run, all of it's fields have been initialized. You never have "half-baked" objects kicking around. if you need to do a batch of operations, some of which depend on knowing an object's key, you can do them all at once without round-tripping to the database. Are there any compelling reasons not to do things this way? That is, when using Guids as keys, is there a good reason to leave key assignment up to the database? Edit: A lot of people have strong opinions on whether or not Guids should be used for PKs (which I knew), but that wasn't really the point of my question. Aside from the clustering issue (which doesn't seem to be a problem if you set your indexes up properly), I haven't seen a compelling reason to avoid creating keys in the application layer.

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