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 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

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