Re: A real world example

JOG wrote:
> Bob Badour wrote:
> > [snip]
> > By accepting his misuse of vocabulary, you encourage and legitimize the
> > illegitimate while you interfere with communication and comprehension.
> > Is it your goal to understand theory or to market the services of
> > ignorants at the expense of their potential clients and other stakeholders?
>
> Of course not. All corrections are welcomed Bob.
>
> > [snip]
> > I disagree that the concept of surrogate vs. natural is useful. A
> > natural key is merely a familiar surrogate.
>
> By this I am unclear what a natural key is a surrogate for. If you
> could spend some time expanding this definition, or referencing it, I'd
> appreciate it.
>
I think I see where Bob is going with this. About 6 weeks ago, my wife and I strung together a couple of arbitrary values, "Wade" and "James", appended a surname, and wound up with a new "natural key" for our son... or is that a surrogate key? The US government runs a database, and in order to add an entry for him into the database, it generated a new surrogate key for our son - but many people treat SSN as a "natural key". Presumably, our son may one day gain employment at the same company at which I work, in which case, he will be assigned a "surrogate key" employee ID. Bob's point, I think, is that there is no fundamental difference between the "natural key" my wife and I generated for our son; the SSN natural/surrogate key the US government generated for our son, and my company's surrogate key Emp_id.

On the other hand, is my DNA sequence a "familiar surrogate key"? It seems there *is* a fundamental difference between "Line 3 of invoice 12" and "line_id 1433" - both may be candidates for the same entity, yet it seems like the first should qualify as a natural key and the second should qualify as a surrogate... making Bob's claim that "A natural key is merely a familiar surrogate." seem a bit of an overgeneralization. Received on Wed Aug 16 2006 - 20:52:28 CEST