Re: Surrogate Key vs Production Key

How does the client manage to enter thousands of child rows, when the error is caused by a mis-type ?

Deferrable Constraints should deal with this.

And if not, then may not be a huge problem to produce a generic copy/delete/insert generator that walks the constraints to produce a program that does the job on auto-pilot.

What about all those wonderful big systems that suddenly realise that they can't do partitioning with local primary key indexes because the "natural" partitioning column is not part of the primary key - and the users don't get any partition elimination in their queries because the only possible elimination on a meaningless key which they don't know ?

-- 
Regards

Jonathan Lewis

http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk/faq/ind_faq.html
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"Noons" <wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
news:73e20c6c.0410080449.50e0a1fd_at_posting.google.com...


>

> Joe never had a client walk in and say:

>

> "you know that code of 'A/0001/sdkjskldjklsd-32998'?

> Shewt!: we mistyped it.

> Can you change it to 'A-0001/sdkjskldjklsd/32998'?

> "

>

> and suddenly he realizes that natural key is now duplicated

> in a 6 level hierarchy of tables as a FK in thousands

> of rows.  Which means a major UPDATE on all those tables

> with all RI disabled.  Count the downtime.

>