RE: How do you genrate primary keys?

Jonathan,

I think your idea of a paper is a good one. But I think we need to back th question up to what the requirements are.

First, to me, a primary key should not be something that a user would ever see or use. So the Soc. Sec. # is out. (A side issue - I used to work at a college. Want to know how many times we had to change the Soc. for an individual student because the parent filled the form out and used their soc, or the kid used the wrong one?). Any id entered by a user is subject to mistakes and changes. So the PK value must be protected from these types of errors.

The next requirement that may be needed is sequentiallity (is this a word?). Does the application require that every sequence number be used. Sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it just doesn't matter.

These are the only two requirements I can think of. Based on the answers, we then have options. Right now, Oracle sequences are working well for me. I like the idea of SYS_GUID, just not sure where I would need it.

Good idea and good luck!

Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 8:19 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

The recent article that mentioned sequences got me to thinking. I might pitch a more detailed article on sequences to Builder.com. But a more interesting article might be one that explored various ways to automatically generate primary keys. So, in the name of research, let me throw out the following questions:

What mechanisms have you used to generate primary keys? Which ones worked well, and why? Which mechanisms worked poorly?

I've run up against the following approaches:

• Hit a table that keeps a counter. This is the "roll your own sequence method". The one time I recall encountering this approach, I helped convert it over to using stored sequences. This was because of concurrency problems: with careful timing, two users could end up with the same ID number for different records. Is there ever a case when this roll-your-own approach makes sense, and is workable?
• Stored sequences. I worked on one app that used a separate sequence for each automatically generated primary key. I worked on another app, a smaller one, that used the same sequence for more than one table. The only issue that I recall is that sometimes numbers would be skipped. But end users really didn't care, or even notice.
• The SYS_GUID approach. I've never used SYS_GUID as a primary key generator. I wonder, was that Oracle's motivation for creating the function? Has anyone used it for primary keys in a production app? What's the real reason Oracle created this function?
• Similar to SYS_GUID, I once worked on an obituary-tracking application that built up a primary key from, as best I can recall now: date of death, part of surname, part of first name, and a sequence number used only to resolve collisions, of which there were few. The approached worked well, actually, because whatever fields we munged together to generate a primary key gave us a unique key the vast majority of the time.

The SYS_GUID approach is interesting, but if you need an ID number that users will see, and that users might type in themselves (e.g. social security number), is SYS_GUID really all that viable?

Best regards,

Jonathan Gennick --- Brighten the corner where you are http://Gennick.com * 906.387.1698 * mailto:jonathan@gennick.com

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