If you
want to use globally unique identifiers Oracle has a sys_guid function to
provide this. There should never be any "additional meaning"
placed in keys.
Ian
MacGregor
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
-----Original Message-----Our developers are proposing a database design for an OLTP application in which each table has a PK of the same type and size. In addition, each possible PK value can belong to at most one table.
From: Brian P Andrews [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, October 31, 2002 5:33 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: Database Design: unique PK across all tablesEach table insert would require a call to the a single function to get the next PK value and an additional table would be used to store the current set of values. (The developers want to put some additional meaning into a PK value and a sequence would not be sufficient, hence the need for the PK generating function and current value table).
I've never seen this done before and I would think this application would suffer greatly from contention when performing a large number of concurrent inserts.
Has anyone ever encountered a design like this? Is this a bad design?
Thanks.
Brian
