Re: Surrogate keys (Was: enums)

[Greg Stark <gsstark(at)mit(dot)edu>]

Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA <leandro(at)dutra(dot)fastmail(dot)fm> writes:

> Certainly decoupling presentation from storage would be nice, but even before 
> that generalised use of surrogate keys seems to me a knee-jerk reaction.

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.

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.

-- 
greg