"If it lacks a single column primary key, some databases, like oracle, make it harder to do an outter join."

I am with dragonchild on this, and your assertion is not true. I deal with Oracle everyday, and never heard of this, as a matter of fact, most of our tables don't have single column primary key.

Go even deeper, personaly I am against the idea of using artificial numbers as keys. If the primary key takes 3 or 4 columns, just take. In this situation, some people will make up a sequence number as single column primary key, I don't.

Something a bit off topic, I hate using current time as part of the primary key. In this system I am supporting now, there are several tables are like this, and every time when two users try to insert to the same table at same time, one of them get kicked because of unique constraint. That's ugly, and is a design defect.

In reply to Re^2: OT: benefits of database normalization by pg
in thread OT: benefits of database normalization by revdiablo

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