Re: Identity key?

Jan Hidders wrote:

> Would that be me? All I said was that you have to have at least one
> natural (candidate) key. It is not neccessarily a problem if that key
> consists of the entire tuple.

Not necessarily a usable solution, either. This gets out of theory and into the specifics of the Sybase implementation, but in Sybase you can't index a column of the text datatype (varchar longer than 255). Since a primary key has to have an index, a text column therefore can't participate in a primary key. We have cases where the entire tuple is needed to provide identity, and the tuple includes attributes which become text columns in Sybase. In these cases, we had no choice but to use surrogate keys.

Larry Coon
University of California
larry_at_assist.org
and lmcoon_at_home.com

The NBA Salary Cap FAQ:
http://www.members.home.net/lmcoon/salarycap.htm Received on Wed Jan 10 2001 - 19:16:47 CET