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 and 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.