Re: Sequence Numbers as Primary Keys
Date: 1995/09/27
Message-ID: <44c3js$m4m_at_athos.cc.bellcore.com>#1/1
^^^^^^^ (jhagans_at_telerama.lm.com) wrote:
> Recently at work ,there has been a controversy between the application development
> group (IT) and the database administration group (DBA) concerning using sequence
> numbers as primary keys and hence as foreign keys in the appropriate table.
> The IT group claims that their C++ program will be much more efficient with fixed-length
> unique identifiers.
> The database has probably around 50 tables with an estimated 6 million hits a day;
> However it is only a few tables (7 or less) that will be getting the majority of the hits. The
> composite key in these tables is quite large, usually 5 or 6 columns to make the row
> unique.
> We are running Oracle 7 on a RS/6000 Unix box.
> Any insight to this matter would be greatly appreciated.
> Joel Hagans
> jhagans_at_telerama.lm.com
The use of "surrogate" keys is a rather well known concept in relational theory. We use a sequence number as our primary key. It works fine. Saying that the data is not business data is pretty lame. Perhaps your DBA's should read "Designing Quality Databases ..." by Thomas A. Bruce.
parris geiser Received on Wed Sep 27 1995 - 00:00:00 CET