Re: Normalization, Natural Keys, Surrogate Keys

"Pablo Sanchez" <pablo_at_dev.null> wrote in message news:3ce97890$1_12_at_news.teranews.com...
>
> "--CELKO--" <71062.1056_at_compuserve.com> wrote in message
> news:c0d87ec0.0205201359.120ca460_at_posting.google.com...
> > >> The SSN is a surrogate key itself, and a BAD one at that. There
> are
> > duplicates out there. <<
> >
> > With Mexican illegals in Calfornia, Texas and other states,
>
> Singling out one ethnic group isn't very productive.... oh well ...
> amazing ... no, actually it's not ...
>
> Businesses operated by good old American citizens are generating
> duplicate social security numbers for illegal aliens.

It's not even that. Under the original scheme there was no method of generating unique SSN's. Since the first 3 digits were code digits, you had a smaller set of unique numbers to chose from. The original thinking was that people would die off fast enough they'd have no proble recycling numbers.

At this point I'm not aware that the SS Administration has handed out any legit dupicates and I know they've taken steps in the past decade or so to eliminate this problem.

> --
> Pablo Sanchez, High-Performance Database Engineering
> mailto:pablo_at_hpdbe.com
> http://www.hpdbe.com
> Available for short-term and long-term contracts
>
>
Received on Tue May 21 2002 - 02:24:02 CEST