Re: Surrogate Key vs Production Key

--CELKO-- wrote:
>
> A data element which can be verified and validated leads to data
> quality. It is a solution, not a problem. Do you really think that,
> say, ISBNs would be better without a check digit? If they did not
> have the publisher codes in them? Would books be easier to locate?
> Would data entry errors increase or decrease if they were a random
> number of varying length?

But you would not use ISBNs as primary key, would you? I built a system a couple of years ago for a local bookshop, and we jumped to the idea that an ISBN sounded like a perfect primary key for a book.

The customer told us not to use it as primary key because a) not every book out there has an ISBN
b) ISBNs are not unique (bummer)! They get recycled over the time.

Cheers,

Holger Received on Fri Oct 15 2004 - 00:29:14 CDT