Re: Natural keys vs Aritficial Keys

"Roy Hann" <specially_at_processed.almost.meat> wrote in message news:9NidnRjYr5xoOIjXnZ2dnUVZ8gidnZ2d_at_pipex.net...
> Michael Schuerig wrote:
>
>> Would you say that these principal functions are essential for, say,
>> blogs, wikis, or social networking sites such as Flickr?
>
> To repeat, no one here says synthetic keys are always wrong. Those
> things you list may well benefit from them.
>
> What IS wrong is insisting that ALL things ALWAYS benefit from them.
> Listing a few examples where they are beneficial doesn't change that.
>

An even stronger claim would be the claim that all designs that are NOT based on a synthetic auto-generated key are somehow defective designs. I've not seen this claim in exactly these words over in stackoverflow.com. But some of the comments seem to me to imply that the author of the comment holds this view.

A comment that is often stated is that the author's personal preference is to ALWAYS assign an auto-generated integer field as the first field of every table, and to name this column ID. Let's leave aside the use of the word "field" rather than column, and the universal name ID. What seems to be missing in the ensuing discussion is that always using an autogenerated field for reference reduces addressing by content to a parody of addressing by location. All of the defects of graph based database organization resurface in a different guise. Received on Thu May 21 2009 - 22:58:01 CEST