Re: IS it a good practice to use SERIAL as Primary Key?

On Nov 28, 2006, at 9:02 , Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 17:31 -0600, John McCawley wrote:
>> I promise I'm not trying to be a pain in the butt ;) Do you then use
>> your serial id as your foreign key in other tables, or the
>> firstname/lastname primary key?
>
> Now that is a good question. I would use the id, but that is not
> technically proper :).

If you have both a surrogate key (the serial column) as well as a
natural key (e.g., the (first_name, last_name) composite key), what
difference does it make? You can get to the first_name, last_name
data via a join on the surrogate key.

I'm currently loosely in the surrogate key + natural key camp. One
advantage of this is that if there *is* a change to the natural key,
it can be changed in one table rather than cascading throughout the
database schema.

Michael Glaesemann
grzm seespotcode net

(Can we talk about NULL next? :P)