Re: What are the design criteria for primary keys?

On 03/09/2010 7:28 PM, Bob Badour wrote:
> paul c wrote:
>
>> On 03/09/2010 6:30 PM, -CELKO- wrote:
>>
>>>>> Celko wants everybody to use published keys, sometimes that's
>>>>> advantageous but it's not essential, after all the published keys
>>>>> one has never seen before aren't familiar before one adopts them.<<
>>>
>>> I like industry standards for several reasons:
>>> 1) Validation = Can I look at it and see the form is correct?
>>> 2) Verification = Can an external source map the key to the entity?
>>> 3) Universality = Does everyone agree on the meaning? This is the
>>> idea of a trusted source to maintain the standard for me (the
>>> laziness principle of programming).
>>>
>>> I think this is more important than familiarity, which is
>>> subjective.
>>
>> (how did I know you would reply?)
>>
>> The first two, whether one likes them or not, are probably de rigueur
>> for a corporation, especially bigger ones, whether one likes that or not.
>>
>> I'd say universality is a crock. Most people don't bother normalizing
>> address attributes when a postal code is involved even though strictly
>> speaking one might think they should. Because they know that the
>> postal services of a hundred countries will never agree on a standard,
>> let alone the upwards of a million municipalities and other
>> jurisdictions could never follow the same standard for street
>> addresses. So the big public as well as private postal operations have
>> a business requirement that they must accept multiple representations
>> for a single postal address. So db designers who try to embellish a
>> simple 'first line, second line, third line' set of address attributes
>> are just playing at fiddlesticks. There are more important criteria.
>
> Try living with an address that has a street #, a phase # and a suite #.
> I cannot count how many idiotic programmers wrote code that threw away
> key parts of my address when I had one like that.

Phases! Haven't run into that one before but I guess there is some db somewhere with a PHASE address attribute. Back in the 1980's, an obscure product called Model204 used to sponsor big conventions in pleasant places and hire totally non-IT people to speak at the lunches.   You might have enjoyed the famous New Orleans Chef named Justin-something-or-other talk about his old ModelT. Charming old guy and I think he might have made a very good biz analyst, at least for me he made his old car sound relevant to software development. Five hundred people were falling off their chairs laughing. The CIA rep who kept his sunglasses on indoors remained expressionless. Received on Sat Sep 04 2010 - 04:38:01 CEST