RE: How do you genrate primary keys?

Mercadante, Thomas F scribbled on the wall in glitter crayon:

> Jonathan,
>
> I think your idea of a paper is a good one. But I think we need to
> back th question up to what the requirements are.
>
> First, to me, a primary key should not be something that a user would
> ever see or use. So the Soc. Sec. # is out. (A side issue - I used
> to work at a college. Want to know how many times we had to change
> the Soc. for an individual student because the parent filled the form
> out and used their soc, or the kid used the wrong one?). Any id
> entered by a user is subject to mistakes and changes. So the PK
> value must be protected from these types of errors.

the other problem is the SS# are not unique. so even if they get entered correctly you can still have a dupe. trust me in this one, i had to pay a lawyer to get it straightened out.

--
Bill "Shrek" Thater     ORACLE DBA      
"I'm going to work my ticket if I can..." -- Gilwell song
                william.thater_at_carrier.utc.com
------------------------------------------------------------------------
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the
people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions
were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned
with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on
the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. -
Douglas Adams
-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
-- 
Author: Thater, William
  INET: William.Thater_at_carrier.utc.com

Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).