Re: OID's vs Relational Keys?

From: -CELKO- <jcelko212_at_earthlink.net>
Date: 22 Dec 2005 10:37:04 -0800
Message-ID: <1135276624.698019.131500_at_g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>


I have invented the term "physical locator" to cover things like the classic hardware pointers you are talking about, row_id within a table structure, hash table values, etc. Anything that:

  1. Is not an attribute in the reality of the data model. in the Relational keys are a set of attributes by definition. Nothing to do with physical storage.
  2. They are generated inside the machine and depend on the internal state of the machine at creation time. Nothing to do with the data model or the real world.

And I do believe in duplicate values, but not duplicate data elements. So did Dr. Codd when he introduced a "Degree of Duplication" operation in his second version of RM. Codd also defined a surrogate as being hidden from users, so things like auto-numbering and IDENTITY do not qualify in most products. Received on Thu Dec 22 2005 - 19:37:04 CET

Original text of this message