Re: Natural keys vs Aritficial Keys

Walter Mitty wrote:

> My big bugaboo with the ID field is that if two rows have different IDs but
> otherwise identical data, there tends to be a disconect between developers
> and analysts as to whether this is harmful duplication or not.

There's no two ways about it. If the row would be duplicated if not for the spurious distinction of a value that was generated only to ensure distinction and *for no other reason*, it's logically still a duplicate row.

By itself a duplicate is absurd but pretty harmless. The problem is when one copy gets updated. Then you've got a contradiction and no logical basis to prefer one over the other. That just can't ever be right and it's not something that can ever be a matter of opinion or taste.

-- 
Roy