Friday 9 January 2015

How are the UNIQUE and PRIMARY KEY constraints different?

A UNIQUE constraint is similar to PRIMARY key, but you can have more than one UNIQUE constraint per table.
When you declare a UNIQUE constraint, SQL Server creates a UNIQUE index to speed up the process of searching for duplicates. In this case the index defaults to NONCLUSTERED index, because you can have only one CLUSTERED index per table.
* The number of UNIQUE constraints per table is limited by the number of indexes on the table
Contrary to PRIMARY key UNIQUE constraints can accept NULL but just once. If the constraint is defined in a combination of fields, then every field can accept NULL and can have some values on them, as long as the combination values is unique.

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