Re: The Case Against Compound/Natural Keys

On 1/29/07, Bobak, Mark <Mark.Bobak_at_il.proquest.com> wrote:
>
> I guess I'm a little late to this party.
>
> FYI, Steve Adams has a nice write up on his website of synthetic vs.
> natural keys:
> http://www.ixora.com.au/tips/design/synthetic_keys.htm
>
>

Steve is effectively saying "Consider your data, your application and your use of the data to determine which kind of keys to use"

As has already been said: Normalization is a good thing. This has been proven over, and over, and over.

Personally and in general, in an OLTP environment, I like natural keys in lookup tables, and surrogate keys in volatile data. This use of surrogate keys can save you much effort in the future when the business rules change. (always a matter of 'when', not 'if')

-- 
Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist

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