Re: [GENERAL] Sufficient Primary Key?

On Fri, 24 Jul 1998, Dan Delaney wrote:

> I don't like doing that because I don't want to store the entire
> name in every other table which needs to be linked with this one.
> So, for instance, in the table that keeps track of what authors go
> to what book, I want it to just have two fields, the Book's primary
> key and the Author's primary key, and I'd prefer those primary keys
> to be nice and small instead of, say, the entire title and copyright
> year for the book and the entire first and last name and date of
> birth for the author. See what I mean?

I see your point, and didn't realize that you had a bunch of other tables
linked. I have actually done something similar to what you want to do, but
with drug numbers and product codes, mainly because using the drug numbers
alone would involve duplicates, and matching approval records to patent
records. There's only so much one can normalize.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
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