Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA <leandro@dutra.fastmail.fm> writes:
> Certainly decoupling presentation from storage would be nice, but even before
> that generalised use of surrogate keys seems to me a knee-jerk reaction.
I hate knee-jerk reactions too, but just think of all the pain of people
dealing with databases where they used Social Security numbers for primary
keys. I would never use an attribute that represents some real-world datum as
a primary key any more.
In my experience there are very few occasions where I want a real non-sequence
generated primary key. I've never regretted having a sequence generated
primary key, and I've certainly had occasions to regret not having one.
--
greg