What's a good natural key? This is a very difficult question for most entities when you design your schema. In some rare cases, there seems to be an "obvious" candidate, such as a variety of ISO standards, including: ISO 639 language codesISO 3166 country codesISO 4217 currency codes But even in those cases, there might … Continue reading The Cost of Useless Surrogate Keys in Relationship Tables
Tag: Surrogate Key
Faster SQL Through Occasionally Choosing Natural Keys Over Surrogate Keys
There are many many opinions out there regarding the old surrogate key vs. natural key debate. Most of the times, surrogate keys (e.g. sequence generated IDs) win because they're much easier to design: They're easy to keep consistent across a schema (e.g. every table has an ID column, and that's always the primary key)They're thus … Continue reading Faster SQL Through Occasionally Choosing Natural Keys Over Surrogate Keys