> > If you're advocating it then you probably won't need to know any > > further arguments since you've already understood the issue > > yourself: That data integrity is what counts. And without composite > > keys, that can't work for any non-trivial application that requires > > a thoroughly normalised schema of significant complexity, since > > proper unification of records in such a schema requires composite > > keys. One of the issues that's practically impossible to solve with > > surrogate keys is explained in database design textbooks under the > > title "overlapping foreign keys". > > I'm not sure to understand exactly the "overlapping foreign keys" (as > you did not give any reference).
Just look it up in any decent database design textbook. ;-) In Belgium, the faculty of computer science at the university of Namur resp. Rever have online "entry level" tutorial PDFs for free that mention it. It's a standard issue just like normalisation (in fact it's sometimes mentioned as being correlated with 3NF/BCNF) and I am not going to "discuss" whether composite (natural) keys are necessary or not. Besides, there are certainly loads of other unification issues that absolutely require composite keys, this is just an exemplary example that has a distinctive, well-known name and that is commonly taught in database design classes. I am not even a computer scientist and still my professor at university has mentioned it. Basta. Sincerely, Wolfgang -- -- [email protected] mailing list --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "tryton" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
