Re: Natural keys vs Aritficial Keys

Don't mind Celko, his a "cowboy dba".

The fact is that you may need a surrogate key in a real world application (not theoretical). If you constantly use a mixture of natural keys and surrogates, your application is going to be a mess. I highly recommend going with a surrogate like an identity column. If you ask Celko for a standard forum DDL where users have the ability to change the topic subject, he will never respond because he doesn't know how (without the use of surrogates). Received on Sun May 17 2009 - 18:32:12 CEST