Re: Primary vs. Surrogate! What a nightmare debate.

"Marshall Spight" <mspight_at_dnai.com> wrote in message news:ak2dd.266907$MQ5.8260_at_attbi_s52...

>
> Ack! No lisp involved!
>
> We don't sell any physical goods, is all I'm saying. We sell a service,
> but it's not physical either; no technician comes to your door. You
> send us money and we do stuff with our database. So there's nothing
> in the physical world for us to use a source of natural keys, unless
> maybe we were to hash what the customer sends us.

Same thing for a bank or an insurance company. Same thing for an airline reservation system.

In fact, the term "employee" in a personnel system is an abstraction. A "person" is a natural object.
But an "employee" is an artificial role that we assign to real persons.

>
>
> > >> "Surrogate" keys as you define them strike me as vile. <<
> >
> > That is not me; that is Dr. Codd.
>
> Six of one. :-)
>

From a certain point of view, all keys are surrogate.

In the Hindu view of the universe, the universe is initially whole. The process of analyzing the universe into discrete entities is a fomr of illusion about the universe, which they call "maya".

So the process I recommend so much, of starting with ER analysis, and working your way to attributes, then to relations, then to tables, then to indexes, and the to database objects, is a process of successive self deception, in the Hindu view.

That is why I am not a "Guru".

Now ask me why I'm not a "geek".

> It makes sense when you put it like that, but I still get surprised.

I am continually shocked, but not surprised, when I see people saying things like:

"We've got to get version one of the Hospital Administration System to market in three months! After that, maybe we'll have time to figure out how a hospital really works." I will never for the life of me figure out how that can possibly work! Received on Tue Oct 19 2004 - 13:55:53 CEST