Re: What are the design criteria for primary keys?

On 03/09/2010 6:30 PM, -CELKO- wrote:
>>> Celko wants everybody to use published keys, sometimes that's advantageous but it's not essential, after all the published keys one has never seen before aren't familiar before one adopts them.<<
>
> I like industry standards for several reasons:
> 1) Validation = Can I look at it and see the form is correct?
> 2) Verification = Can an external source map the key to the entity?
> 3) Universality = Does everyone agree on the meaning? This is the
> idea of a trusted source to maintain the standard for me (the
> laziness principle of programming).
>
> I think this is more important than familiarity, which is
> subjective.
>
>
>
>

(how did I know you would reply?)

The first two, whether one likes them or not, are probably de rigueur for a corporation, especially bigger ones, whether one likes that or not.

I'd say universality is a crock. Most people don't bother normalizing address attributes when a postal code is involved even though strictly speaking one might think they should. Because they know that the postal services of a hundred countries will never agree on a standard, let alone the upwards of a million municipalities and other jurisdictions could never follow the same standard for street addresses. So the big public as well as private postal operations have a business requirement that they must accept multiple representations for a single postal address. So db designers who try to embellish a simple 'first line, second line, third line' set of address attributes are just playing at fiddlesticks. There are more important criteria. Received on Sat Sep 04 2010 - 03:46:56 CEST