Re: Primary Key

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On Fri, 16 Nov 2007 20:00:29 +0000
Sam Mason <sam(at)samason(dot)me(dot)uk> wrote:

> > > Normally a primary key would just be a single column. When you
> > > start going to that many I'd probably have a serial column as the
> > > primary key, and a UNIQUE index on those six fields. Depends on
> > > what you're doing, though unless you've got a few years
> > > experience I'd be tempted to stay away from primary keys of more
> > > than a single column.
> >
> > Fie on you evil synthetic key lovers. Long live the Natural Key!
>
> Really? I started off with everything using sequences and everything
> was good. Then I found I wanted to do more complicated things so I
> started to transition to natural keys and things were better. Then
> I took things too far and wanted something artificial back in my

When that is needed I do this:

create table foo(id serial unique, a text, b text, primary (a,b));

Joshua D. Drake

> life. I'm back to almost never using natural keys now, mainly because
> interfacing with the outside world gets too complicated. When I'm
> just doing stuff inside the database then I can use natural keys and
> all is good, otherwise things just get too complicated.
>
> I'll probably look back in another few years and remember how young
> and naive I was back now.
>
>
> Sam
>
> ---------------------------(end of
> broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your
> friend
>

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