On Fri, 16 Nov 2007, Merlin Moncure wrote:
the sad fact is that sequences have made developers lazy
Nah, developers were lazy long before that. If you ask Larry Wall it's a virtue.
I gave up on this argument ten years ago after a long battle with well-known natural key zealot Joe Celko wore me out. He published one of his many articles making a case for them using an example from the automotive industry. Only problem was, the unique identifier he suggested wasn't. At the auto parts company I worked for, I had just spent many monotonous days contorting keys to work around a problem caused by the original designer there, who misunderstood some nuances of how the "Big Three" auto manufacturers assigned part numbers the same way Celko did.
He doesn't use that example anymore but still misses the point I tried to make. The ability of the world to invalidate the assumptions that go into natural key assignment are really impressive. I particularly enjoy that so many systems are built presuming that the Social Security number for a person is involatile that this topic comes up in their FAQ about identify theft: http://www.socialsecurity.gov/pubs/10064.html
-- * Greg Smith gsmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
