Re: Database design, Keys and some other things

Dawn,

I think the problems that are encountered with the RM are to do with the fact that it's fundamental principle that we should use values to define something (as opposed to an identifier) is flawed. Its analagous to the movement called realism, which has its roots as far back as Plato. Specifically a sub-philosophy called essentialism:

"Essentialism is the belief and practice centered around a
philosophical claim that for any specific kind of entity it is at least theoretically possible to specify a finite list of characteristics, all of which any entity must have to belong to the group defined."

Well this is exactly what the RM does - an entity's form defines it, and thats why in principal you should be using natural keys, and using any other abritrary id's is a bit of a fudge within RM.

*However* in over the years this essentialist viewpoint has been pretty much anhiallated, and nowadays seems extremely antiquated. Rather a stronger belief now is nominalism:

"Nominalism is the position in metaphysics that there exist no
universals outside of the mind."

This would mean there is no natural primary key can produce some universal fingerprint from which to describe something - yet that's what RM's want you to do. And so to fix this incorrect viewpoints in RM, people bang in surrogate keys to represent the artificial uniqeness of an item that we necessarily create in our minds. Received on Mon Sep 26 2005 - 18:44:03 CEST