Re: Surrogate VS natural keys

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, brian wrote:

> The former uses a primary key across both columns to enforce a unique
> constraint. In the latter, you have a seperate ID column, which does not
> enforce that constraint. And you have to ask yourself if you'll ever be
> referencing that ID column for anything at all. I doubt i ever would.
> Generally, you'd be using this to relate rows from a more generalised
> table using either the club ID or the user ID. I can't see how having a
> seperate serial ID column would be useful for any kind of select.

   Also, the reason for a third, M-M, table is to relate multiple players and
multiple clubs. If you think of the logic involved, your third table has
only one row for each player-club combination. Therefore, each row is unique
by definition and a surrogate key adds no value.

Rich

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