Re: How do you genrate primary keys?

I'm a bit surprised no one's mentioned it, but there's an article about the use of surrogate keys at Ixora :

http://www.ixora.com.au/tips/design/synthetic_keys.htm

mvg/regards

Jo

Jonathan Gennick <jonathan_at_gennick.com>
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11/05/2003 14:19
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        Subject:        How do you genrate primary keys?

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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