> On 3/10/05 3:04 AM, "Jürgen Saar" <jsaa..eb.de> wrote:
> > But this only makes sense for connecting cayenne to
> > 'historically grown' projects ... new projects should
> > not have meaningful PKs
Kevin Menard <kmenar..ervprise.com> wrote:
> Out of curiousity, what do you suggest? Normalizing the relations and
then
> ignoring the functional dependencies by adding a separate numeric id
field?
> I can see how such works better with something like Cayenne, but it does
> seem to run counter-intuitive to the model that was just designed
> (especially with "static" information, such as an SSN).
I'm probably misunderstanding something, but if you're suggesting that using
a SSN can be a good idea because it won't change, you're probably being
short-sighted.
What happens when you find out a month later that someone typed the SSN in
wrong? Now you've got references to the wrong SSN all over your database?
Time to go in manually and edit everything......
A meaningless primary key never needs to change because it doesn't represent
anything. It's the only thing guaranteed to never change. No other piece
of data can make that claim. If nothing else, data entry errors could cause
a seemingly-constant value to change.
-Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Thu Mar 10 2005 - 10:14:36 EST