Would the title, and the tone of your post, would have been "An alternate technique ..." instead of "An improved technique ...", I would have had a completely different feeling.

I really abhor your thoughts now. This goes straight into colision course with normalization. There is absoloutely no need for surrogate keys if the primary key is unique and used as such. In many many many occasions, the real key indead has a meaning, or even better, a centralized (or decentralized looking from the opposite site) location where the "base" table values can be fetched for reference. Think of the prefix for phone numbers for countries. In those cases the keys are obvious and logical. Dialing +31 will get you to the Netherlands, and that is very unlikely to change. In a table that would store the country name for prefixes, the keys should simple be 31.


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

In reply to Re: An improved technique for database primary keys by Tux
in thread An alternate technique for database primary keys by locked_user sundialsvc4

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