On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 19:45 -0700, Bayle wrote: > I'm not advocating that a detailed introduction to databases be added > to the tutorial. But it might be nice to mention very briefly that if > you don't know what a primary key is, it's a unique ID for each row in > a database table, and furthermore the easiest way to deal with them is > to add an extra column to each table of type Integer, and make that the > primary key (unless this advice is in error; as I noted, I don't know > anything about databases).
Many database professionals would argue against such advice. Although a primary key is supposed to be a unique ID for a given database "entity", it is generally preferable to use "natural" or "standard" IDs as primary keys. Since the page title in the wiki is unique it's a "natural" choice. "Standard" IDs include things like country, currency and language codes, SSN or other government-dictated IDs, ISBNs, UPCs, etc. The fact that MySQL can't handle Unicode strings as primary keys is more a reflection on the implementation. Nevertheless, because natural identifiers are not sufficiently unique (personal names), too lengthy (a complete street address) or otherwise cumbersome, the practice of using sequentially-assigned integers is quite common, although technically they are surrogate primary keys (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogate_key). Joe --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
