I regularly use surrogate/artificial/auto-increment/meaningless primary keys for most of my tables. While I've only been a full-time developer for about 6 years, I have seen this as commonplace and certainly not unusual. I also find they map nicely to the concept of Identity in O/R mapping.
I've recently encountered a customer whose only exposure is 12 years of SAP. From what I understand, the concept of using anything but "natural" keys is completely foreign to them, and they think the idea that an automatically generated meaningless sequential number is "cutting edge" and "unproven", as though I invented the concept. They're concerned that it won't scale to very large databases like they're used to seeing, such as Coca-Cola's customer database.
My question is this: can anyone out there name a big company / very large database that makes use of auto-increment primary keys? I'm pretty sure this is all I need to make them comfortable that it's "proven" and "works with very large databases". Or am I naive to think that a single-column artificial primary key can be a "good thing", even or especially with many rows? I understand that there are pros and cons to each style, I'm just looking for an example of a "proven" implementation to put my customer at ease.
Please share any experiences with this or even as to how to convince someone that the sky won't fall if I use them.
Thanks in advance, Colin
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