Greetings,
I think I saw an article yesterday in which you told someone not to make
an Identity column a primary key. I seem to remember you saying
something like "It undermines the entire foundation of the relational
model."
I've been thinking about that all night and I think I understand what
you're saying, but I have some questions.
I think you're saying that if the real key in a 3 attribute (heh, heh.
didn't say fields. heh heh) tuple (heh heh) is a combination of the
three attributes, then that's what you should use as a primary key.
Do you then advocate never using an Identity attribute? Or is it
acceptable (in the relational model) to have an Identity attribute to
use as a handle to the row, and for attributes in other tables to use as
the target for a foreign key?
Thank you,
-- Rick
I think I saw an article yesterday in which you told someone not to make
an Identity column a primary key. I seem to remember you saying
something like "It undermines the entire foundation of the relational
model."
I've been thinking about that all night and I think I understand what
you're saying, but I have some questions.
I think you're saying that if the real key in a 3 attribute (heh, heh.
didn't say fields. heh heh) tuple (heh heh) is a combination of the
three attributes, then that's what you should use as a primary key.
Do you then advocate never using an Identity attribute? Or is it
acceptable (in the relational model) to have an Identity attribute to
use as a handle to the row, and for attributes in other tables to use as
the target for a foreign key?
Thank you,
-- Rick