Sally Sally wrote:
Can you please elaborate on the point you just made as to why the primary key should not relate to the data (even for a case when there is an existing unique field that can be used to identify the record)
Here is a good article on the topic:
http://www.devx.com/ibm/Article/20702
That article makes me want to vomit uncontrollably! ;-)
"Business data might also simply be bad -- glitches in the Social Security Administration's system may lead to different persons having the same Social Security Number. A surrogate key helps to isolate the system from such problems."
The surrogate key isn't solving the underlying logical inconsistency problem. It is being used as a work-around to cover one up. I suspect the author of being a MySQL user.
Mike Mascari
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