The present invention relates to a method or system of generating a surrogate key using cryptographic hashing. One embodiment of the method of the present invention may have steps such as selecting a field or group of fields that is or are unique among all records in the database, for each record, extracting the data from the fields, concatenating the extracted data into an input message, running the input message through a hash generator, either in batches or one at a time, for testing purposes perhaps, and outputting a surrogate key.