Re: I am confused as to whether I should use numeric IDs or not

This IS actually the way you should do it. This is what relational databases are for. You use queries to gather the information you need.

Example of a problem that could arise using names as referential keys: What if you made a typo in someone's name? You would have to change the key in every table.

Anne

<snip>
>That being said though, I am confused as to whether and why I should use
>their NumericIDs in the foreign tables. For example, the CONTACT_HISTORY
>table should have the id of the contact, date of contact, the name of the
>salesman, and the name of the customer who the salesman had contact with.
>So it is CONTACT(ContactID, Date, SalesmanID, CustomerID). What I am
>wondering is whether I should use the numeric CustomerID or actually the
>physical name of the customer in the contact table. Because numeric id by
>itself doesn't tell much. And I have a VB form that would be bound to
>extract the contact information from my CONTACT table. So if I use numeric
>ids, every time a contact_history record is accessed, there will be queries
>made on the CUSTOMER AND SALEMSAN tables as well in order to extract their
>names based on their numeric IDs. That seems kind of inefficient that you
>have to run queries on all three tables, when you just want to see the
>CONTACT records and can easily store the name information in the contact
>table itself instead of having to store IDs and then running a query back
 to
>get the names.
>
>Thanks,
>Mike
>
>
Received on Tue Feb 01 2000 - 00:00:00 CET