Sequence Numbers as Primary Keys
Date: 1995/09/24
Message-ID: <442o26$6dm_at_hudson.lm.com>#1/1
Recently at work ,there has been a controversy between the application development group (IT) and the database administration group (DBA) concerning using sequence numbers as primary keys and hence as foreign keys in the appropriate table.
The IT group claims that their C++ program will be much more efficient with fixed-length unique identifiers.
The DBA group refuses to use sequence numbers claiming that they are not "business data" and do not belong in the database.
The database has probably around 50 tables with an estimated 6 million hits a day; However it is only a few tables (7 or less) that will be getting the majority of the hits. The composite key in these tables is quite large, usually 5 or 6 columns to make the row unique.
We are running Oracle 7 on a RS/6000 Unix box.
Any insight to this matter would be greatly appreciated.
Joel Hagans
jhagans_at_telerama.lm.com
Received on Sun Sep 24 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST