Re: surrogate key or not?

On Jul 23, 2004, at 6:00 PM, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:

> On Friday 23 July 2004 03:29 pm, Michael Glaesemann wrote:
>
>>
>> You appear to be misunderstanding the purpose of a primary key. A
>> primary key is used to ensure there is a way to identify each row
>> uniquely. It is quite independent of which columns you may or may not
>> want to search on. If name is not going to be necessarily unique in 
>> the
>> table, it isn't a primary key.
>
> ive not misunderstood anything. this is one of the tables in question:
>
> address_type
> id serial PRIMARY KEY
> name text UNIQUE NOT NULL
>
> i think it is self explanatory


In the example you originally gave, there is no indication of name 
being a primary key:

On Friday 23 July 2004 12:27 pm, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> id    serial unique
> name    varchar(25) not null
> primary key is name - after all, you are going to search this on name 
> arent
> you? or is there some advantage in doing it your way?

Also, your explanation "after all, you are going to search..." did not 
mention row uniqueness at all. Sorry if this is not what you meant, but 
I can only go by what you've written.

Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com