-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 11/27/06 12:53, John McCawley wrote: > >> Yes, that's the point. They are legacy designs, and that portion of >> the design is wrong. >> >> >> > I'll weigh in my my .02 on this subject. After much pain and agony in > the real world, I have taken the stance that every table in my database > must have an arbitrary, numeric primary key (generally autogenerated). > I have found that this gets me into a lot of arguments with other > database guys, but never seems to cause any problems for me. > Conversely, I have seen innumerable problems in the real world caused by > the usage of actual data as primary keys. > > Perhaps I am amazingly ignorant, but I have yet to find a case where my > approach causes any real problems. What does using "real" data as a > primary key buy you? The only real advantages I can see are that an > individual record's data will be somewhat more human-readable without > joining to other tables, and that your search queries can be simpler > because they don't have to join against other tables. Joshua Drake wrote an interesting blog article earlier this year about what happened when a firm he was contracting for dropped the natural key on an important table and retained only the synthetic key. Unfortunately I can't find it... :( > On the (many) occasions that I have worked on databases with "real" data > as primary keys, I just saw so many problems arise. In the real world, > data changes, even supposedly unchangeable data. When using arbitrary > primary keys, all you have to do is change the data in the one table > where it lives. If you are using real data as your keys, you have write > complex queries or code to "fix" your data when the supposedly > unchangeable data changes. > > Anyway, I'm sure this is a huge argument, but that's my 0.2 - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Is "common sense" really valid? For example, it is "common sense" to white-power racists that whites are superior to blacks, and that those with brown skins are mud people. However, that "common sense" is obviously wrong. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFFa0FoS9HxQb37XmcRAt8ZAJ40c0KtB8zHifTymcsa/PBLwWkEuACfQ+dD K+4NNU7m0RNTQLgeP9pNaqQ= =SH10 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
