Re: Separate PK in Jxn Tbl?

On Jan 29, 8:37 pm, "Sylvain Lafontaine" <sylvain aei ca (fill the blanks, no spam please)> wrote:
> I was making a direct reference to the following quote:
>
> > In a recent thread on this subject, Tony Toews Access MVP qualified
> > that he liked using incremental autonumbers (rather than random)
> > because they where easier to type (WHERE ID = -2001736589 may
> > encourage typos) and easier to drop into conversation ("Hello Tony?
> > I'm seeing a problem with the record where the ID is -2001736589...").
>
> Of course, theoritically and in a world with unlimited budget, you're right
> in the sense that a surrogate key should never cross the boundaries of a
> database (the interface beeing located inside in these boundaries) but my
> clients don't have infinite budget and my brain isn't infinite either.

OK since you admit you raised the 'budget' issue, what do *you* think the impact on 'budget' is when choosing random autonumber over incremental autonumber?

My understanding is that Tony Toews Access MVP chooses incremental autonumber because he likes to refer to a row (entity) using an address (or possibly by position) i.e. he doesn't choose random autonumber because he doesn't like the values it would generate (too many digits, negative values, etc). I offer this to discredit your assertion, "for those who are using surrogate keys, the exact value of an address inside the database has zero importance".

Again, I ask you to consider the posts we see in the Access groups asking to reseed an incremental autonumber back to one or because they are perplexed/outraged that gaps have appeared in their autonumber sequences. If the exact values of these so-called surrogates have "zero importance" to these people then why are they making these requests?

PS what about the other comments you seemingly aimed at me: codifying, reengineering, etc? Why no mention of them in your reply?

Jamie.

--