Re: The Case Against Compound/Natural Keys

On 1/29/07, Bobak, Mark <Mark.Bobak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


I guess I'm a little late to this party.

FYI, Steve Adams has a nice write up on his website of synthetic vs.
natural keys:
http://www.ixora.com.au/tips/design/synthetic_keys.htm



Steve is effectively saying "Consider your data, your application
and your use of the data to determine which kind of keys to use"

As has already been said: Normalization is a good thing.  This
has been proven over, and over, and over.

Personally and in general, in an OLTP environment, I like natural keys in
lookup tables, and surrogate keys in volatile data.  This use of surrogate
keys can save you much effort in the future when the business rules
change.  (always a matter of 'when', not 'if')


--
Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist

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