When having an identity column is not a good idea?

Question

In tables where you need only 1 column as the key, and values in that column can be integers, when you shouldn\'t use an identity field?

To the contrary, in

Answer 1

If you already settled on the surrogate side of the Great Primary Key Debacle then I can't find a single reason not use use identity keys. The usual alternatives are guids (they have many disadvatages, primarily from size and randomness) and application layer generated keys. But creating a surrogate key in the application layer is a little bit harder than it seems and also does not cover non-application related data access (ie. batch loads, imports, other apps etc). The one special case is distributed applications when guids and even sequential guids may offer a better alternative to site id + identity keys..