Re: Surrogate keys (Was: enums)

Greg Stark <gsstark <at> mit.edu> writes:

> 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.

I am not familiar with the situation.


> 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.

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/database/soup/archives/007327.asp?rss=1