Re: pervasiveness of surrogate (also called synthetic) keys

Merlin Moncure wrote:
> If your data modeler that made the the assumptions that a MAC is
> unique (a mistake obviously) at least the other tables are protected
> from violations of that assumption because the database would reject
> them with an error, which is a Good Thing. Without a uniqueness
> constraint you now have ambiguous data which is a Very Bad Thing.
>

With a uniqueness constraint in this situation, the unexpected data--row
with a non unique MAC--will be rejected and possibly lost when the
insertion happens. You say that's a good thing, plenty of people will
say that's the worst possible thing that can happen. When dealing with
external data, it's often impossible to know everything you're going to
see later at design time. Approaching that problem with the idea that
you're going to lose any data that doesn't fit into the original model
is not what everyone finds reasonable behavior.

I don't think it's possible to decide in a generic way which of these is
the better approach: to reject unexpected data and force the problem
back at the application immediately (commit failure), or to accept with
with because you're using a surrogate key and discover the problems down
the line. Both are valid approaches with a very different type of risk
associated with them. I think it's fair to say that real-world data is
not always well known enough at design time to follow the idea you're
suggesting though, and that does factor into why there is such a
preference for surrogate keys in the industry.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
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