Hi Dan,
The developer (Vendor app, not dev'ed in house) chose long ago to use
a surrugate (.nextval) converted to string-type data.
This value is used only to uniquely identify each row in the table,
and is then inserted with related records in other tables.
It is used for nothing else but to tie these other records to the
'master' record. It's value is never used or consumed anywhere,
other than database operations (joins etc.) and has no correlation or
relation to the data in these rows (other than being in same row).
I could understand if this data had any meaning, other than a
'fingerprint'; for a record, but in this case, that's all it is.
Given that this is the case, will this database suffer much in terms
of disk/memory I/O, etc. vs using some numeric type for this column?
I ask because Oracle is a different animal than what I am used to.
Thanks
> Yes.
>
> But business rules should be established for such matters. What is
> the business rule? If you don't know ... have someone tell you.
> --
> Daniel A. Morgan
> University of Washington
> damor..._at_x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond)
> Puget Sound Oracle Users Groupwww.psoug.org
Received on Fri Jun 08 2007 - 11:11:33 CDT
