> > Heh... read the article... Had never heard anyone complain before about > arbitrary primary keys... and honestly, it strikes me as being rather > odd... I've only ever heard people complain about meaningful keys > actually. But it just seems really odd to complain that "hey, it's a > challenge to figure out who a person's boss is by looking at the primary > key in this table directly" when I always thought it was sort of > contrary to the notion of software for people to be looking at those > primary keys. People don't want to see the key anyway, they want to see > human values -- so why would it be a problem that something they don't > want or need to see is confusing to look at?
Agreed! This is exactly what the 'respected' Joe Celko preaches and it is clearly dangerous. It can creep up more subtly though as with the situation of the OPer. I have found myself doing these things half by mistake and now conscious of the issue am rectifying where possible. One example is writing facebook applications; I store all my facebook users that interact with my app in a user table and have been using the Facebook userID as the PK, a bigint. Seemed ok enough until I wondered what happens when Facebook change their userIDs from bigints to UUIDs... oops. I have corrected that one since reading the article already. Obvious really, just needed going back to school. Dominic -- Blog it up: http://fusion.dominicwatson.co.uk ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Adobe® ColdFusion® 8 software 8 is the most important and dramatic release to date Get the Free Trial http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;160198600;22374440;w Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:296712 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
