Re: Trend towards artificial keys (GUIDs) sez my textbook...is AI next?

On Dec 16, 3:00 pm, Hugo Kornelis
<h..._at_perFact.REMOVETHIS.info.INVALID> wrote

> >So, from this passage, I think the author does a good job disclaiming
> >the slavish use of GUIDs without understanding their drawbacks, even
> >after the author said he's a "big fan" of such GUIDs.
>
> True. But in the rest of his book, he adds a surrogate key (either GUID
> or IDENTITY) to every entity before and without considering whether one
> is needed. I believe that logical design should be done completely
> without surrogate keys. They MIGHT be introduced during physical design,
> but not before.

OK I'll keep this in mind when trying to architect a database system-- use natural keys. Which is easier said than done: how unique is anybody nowadays ('hair color, height, weight, name, shoe size') with 300M Americans and 9B people on the planet? I'm not sure even a GUID is 100% safe with those big numbers?! Maybe we need biometrics. But I guess most databases are not designed to be so scalable anyway, so perhaps natural keys are indeed the best bet.

RL Received on Mon Dec 17 2007 - 08:58:10 CST