"Joshua D. Drake" wrote: <snip/> > > That's it, in a nut shell. There is no argument there. That is why you > don't use artificial keys. That said... pretty much every table I create > will have an artificial key... because it makes managing data easy. An > example (to reuse the simple example): > > users > ===== > id serial unique, > first_name text, > last_name text, > primary key (first_name,last_name) Why not users ===== id serial primary key, first_name text, last_name text, unique (first_name, last_name) ? This way, you can use the "id" as foreign key (more efficient), allows you to "UPDATE first_name" if needed, and if you find out you need to add another Joshua Drake to the DB, all you need is to drop the unique constraint?
