Re: PRIMARY KEYS

This is none of my beeswax but I was just reading an excerpt from a book
introducing relational database concepts and one of the points made was
that it is a good practice to use a primary key that is devoid of any
significance -- it should only be significant as a primary key.  The
reason for this is that when there is meaning to a column, then there is
the possibility that the column may be altered in some way, so it is
best to use a "pure" primary key column dedicated to that purpose.



Erik



elein wrote:
> This is unlike any database theory I've heard of.
> Choosing a natural key over an artificial key is
> the ideal.  I've heard that a lot.
>
> Sometimes there are several candidate keys to
> choose from.  And sometimes the primary keys
> are more than one column.
>
> Sometimes I bail out to an artificial key when the
> primary key is too long, but it depends very much on how
> the table will be accessed and who knows what and
> when.
>
> --elein
>
> On Tuesday 20 May 2003 05:41, Karsten Hilbert wrote:
>
>>And - if you agree with database theory - a bad one at that.
>>Supposedly primary keys should be void of any meaning bar
>>their primary key-ness. I got into the habit of starting
>>any but the most simple table like this:
>>
>>create table (
>>    id serial primary key,
>>    ...
>>
>>Never had any trouble with that. Good or bad practice ? Gotta
>>decide for yourself.
>>
>>Karsten
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>
>