Re: Surrogate Keys: an Implementation Issue
From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:22:43 GMT
Message-ID: <Tv7yg.27469$pu3.363556_at_ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>
>
>
> The idea of hidden surrogates and associated myths is mistakenly nurtured by
> many who are intimately familiar with current crop of SQL products. For
> instance, a cursory inspection of some sql programming newsgroups reveals
> several blatant claims like:
> -- Surrogates are immutable
> -- Surrogates should not be exposed the user
> -- Surrogates help performance
> -- Surrogates belong to the physical model
> -- Surrogates are never verifiable in reality
> -- ...
>
> In most cases, claimant misses the fundamental that a surrogate key is
> nothing but a simple, stable and generally an irreducible candidate key. And
> that it has nothing to do with the physical model and that once used outside
> the DBMS, it is verifiable as well.
Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2006 18:22:43 GMT
Message-ID: <Tv7yg.27469$pu3.363556_at_ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>
Anith Sen wrote:
>>> I doubt that there are any such rdbms's today. It is like criticism of >>>RT because of SQL shortcomings - the lack of faithful implementations >>>only serves to encourage naive extensions to RT.
>
>
> The idea of hidden surrogates and associated myths is mistakenly nurtured by
> many who are intimately familiar with current crop of SQL products. For
> instance, a cursory inspection of some sql programming newsgroups reveals
> several blatant claims like:
> -- Surrogates are immutable
> -- Surrogates should not be exposed the user
> -- Surrogates help performance
> -- Surrogates belong to the physical model
> -- Surrogates are never verifiable in reality
> -- ...
>
> In most cases, claimant misses the fundamental that a surrogate key is
> nothing but a simple, stable and generally an irreducible candidate key. And
> that it has nothing to do with the physical model and that once used outside
> the DBMS, it is verifiable as well.
Not only verifiable, but natural too! Received on Thu Jul 27 2006 - 20:22:43 CEST