On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, James Turner wrote:

> I'm doing a lot of insurance work now, and
> social security number is typically a primary key on tables, as well as the
> input users need to log in.

That's a terrible design decision.  What do you do if someone doesn't have
a social security number, just make something up?  What do you do if the
social security system is revamped and everyone gets new numbers?

> And it's important to know the difference between a missing user and
> some weird case where there's multiple values returned.

The column should be unique if they're being used as a primary key.
Allowing the differentiation of 0 and more than 1 primary key results
encourages bad design and I don't think that we should do that.

-Kurt



--
To unsubscribe, e-mail:   <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Reply via email to