Re: Artificial Primary keys

"B. Hawes" <bhawes_at_satx.rr.com> wrote in message <news:d478259.0202071146.7bce89b4_at_posting.google.com>...

> And something additional that hasn't been mentioned yet, in
> applauding the join response time gained by using generated surrogate
> keys, be sure to offset that with the additional cost & maintenace of
> maintaining a redundant unique index on the table when there is
> already perfectly valid one that 99% of the users will actually be
> using in queries. (employee-id, start_date).

What then is this "employee-id", a divinely-guaranteed-unique label affixed to every newborn by God Himself? Where did we get this idea that OIDs may come from pieces of paper (invoice numbers, anyone?) but absolutely nowhere else? So-called "natural" keys are often as arbitrary as any synthetic key!

--
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