On 08/25/2015 09:40 AM, Melvin Davidson wrote:
Adrian,If I'm following correctly, you're saying that if the definition of the entity contains and arbitrary unique value then use that. Fine. I guess I quibble with the notion of VIN as a "natural" attribute of car. (I have no firsthand experience with VINs but I would bet there's information tucked inside them, which would make me sceptical of using them :) )
Stop being so technical. When we/I speak of natural keys, we are talking about the column
that would NATURALly lend itself as the primary key.
No one ever said a number is not natural. just that there is no need to duplicate uniqueness
with a separate number.
IOW: If we have an account table, then the account_id or account_no
would be the primary key. There is no need to have a separate serial id as the primary key.
Yes, the VIN is an encoding in a similar fashion to how Object IDs function in the computer world: http://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/apa/oid.html
The problem with using a VIN is a combination of usability during manual entry - even with the checksum feature - and the fact that only physically produced vehicles are assigned one but both manufacturers and their dealers end up dealing with the concept of a vehicle before one is ever produced. Neither are overly problematic but they are annoying enough that usually additional identifiers are constructed an used by the business in order to avoid having to see the VIN as anything other than an attribute. The length itself is also problematic - 17 characters typically is a bit much when the user likely only care about thousands or tens of thousands of entities at any given time.
David J.
