Re: What are the design criteria for primary keys?
From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:11:37 -0300
Message-ID: <4c81b8f4$0$11844$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net>
>> paul c wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Try living with an address that has a street #, a phase # and a suite #.
>> I cannot count how many idiotic programmers wrote code that threw away
>> key parts of my address when I had one like that.
Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2010 00:11:37 -0300
Message-ID: <4c81b8f4$0$11844$9a566e8b_at_news.aliant.net>
paul c wrote:
> On 03/09/2010 7:28 PM, Bob Badour wrote: >
>> paul c wrote:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Try living with an address that has a street #, a phase # and a suite #.
>> I cannot count how many idiotic programmers wrote code that threw away
>> key parts of my address when I had one like that.
> > Phases! Haven't run into that one before but I guess there is some db > somewhere with a PHASE address attribute. Back in the 1980's, an > obscure product called Model204 used to sponsor big conventions in > pleasant places and hire totally non-IT people to speak at the lunches. > You might have enjoyed the famous New Orleans Chef named > Justin-something-or-other talk about his old ModelT. Charming old guy > and I think he might have made a very good biz analyst, at least for me > he made his old car sound relevant to software development. Five > hundred people were falling off their chairs laughing. The CIA rep who > kept his sunglasses on indoors remained expressionless.
Culinary Institute of America? ;) Received on Sat Sep 04 2010 - 05:11:37 CEST