Yep, I believe the practice is called a "surrogate key" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogate_key ). There are arguments for and against them, and certainly previous Mahara devs didn't care for mandatory surrogate keys.
But I'm in favor of them. In my experience it's a lot more common to find yourself in a situation where you wish a table had an arbitrary unique ID, than to find yourself in a situation where it doesn't. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Mahara Contributors, which is subscribed to Mahara. Matching subscriptions: Subscription for all Mahara Contributors -- please ask on #mahara-dev or mahara.org forum before editing or unsubscribing it! https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/845948 Title: missing primary keys Status in Mahara ePortfolio: Confirmed Bug description: It seems during the installation of Mahara several tables are created without primary keys. This caused a headache for us when restoring tables from a pg_dump script, duplicate records were created. Specifically the table 'blocktype_installed_category', caused duplicate block types in the UI (confusing some users). A further check revealed the following tables also missing primary keys: artefact_log view_access view_visit blocktype_installed_category Version: 1.4.0 Database: Postgres OS: Linux/RHEL To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/845948/+subscriptions _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~mahara-contributors Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~mahara-contributors More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
