Re: Identity key?

Hello Joe, its been a while ....

I recently began a new position in an Informix shop. Informix has a "serial" data type which "stores a sequential integer assigned automatically by the database..." which would seem to be sort of like the "IDENTITY" data type under discussion here.? Almost every table here has a serial column used to uniquely identify rows instead of a "real" primary key which, in the states example, would be the state_code, right?

(They also make extensive use of the ROWID which is an entirely different topic ...)

 On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, Joe Celko wrote:

>
> >> Then in the example
> CREATE TABLE US_States
> (state_id IDENTITY,
> state_code CHAR(2) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
> state_name VARCHAR(15) NOT NULL UNIQUE);
>
> state_id would be an artificial key? <<
>

Thank you,
Lucky

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