Re: Artificial Primary keys

On 24 Jan 2002 06:24:30 -0800, mrussell_at_beeb.net (Michael Russell) wrote:

[snip]
>Nounu,
>The point about needing to change the PK is taken; don't you think
>this can be handled by cascading the changes to all the foreign keys?

What if the FK table has 400 Million Rows. :(

Artificial Keys are "private" to the database and should not be exposed to the outside world and thus will never need to be changed.

So, in this case, use the artificial key for the FK and expose the natural key ( employee-id + start-date ) to the outside world.

[snip]
>
>Regards and thanks for your reply,
>
>Michael

Daryl Richter
Lead Programmer, Exelon Power Team
drichter[at]pwrteam[dot]com
http://www.exeloncorp.com/powerteam Received on Thu Jan 24 2002 - 21:08:24 CET