DateTime.Now.Ticks repeating inside a loop

Question

I am trying to generate a unique ID for the primary key of a table and I am using DateTime.Now.Ticks for it. That\'s a requirement for now we can\'t use Ident

Answer 1

TL;DR:

The precision of DateTime.Now is around 15ms, if you loop faster than that, DateTime.Now will have the same value over differents iterations.

---

As described in the .Net source code:

The data is stored as an unsigned 64-bit integeter

Bits 01-62: The value of 100-nanosecond ticks where 0 represents 1/1/0001 12:00am, up until the value 12/31/9999 23:59:59.9999999

Furthermore, the DateTime.Now is quite imprecise:

The resolution of this property depends on the system timer, which is approximately 15 milliseconds on Windows systems

---

For the ID assignation part, as other stated, use GUID which have been made for this purpose.