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Re: assigning primary key on insertion
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Re: assigning primary key on insertion


  • Subject: Re: assigning primary key on insertion
  • From: Deirdre Saoirse Moen <email@hidden>
  • Date: Tue, 20 May 2003 16:08:31 -0700

On Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 03:40  PM, Anjo Krank wrote:

You may not care about this, but I've seen it create more than one fracas, so I'll point out the potential downside of this: assigning the primary key in advance inherently means there will be holes in primary key sequence numbers. Now, usually, that's not an issue, but if one of your primary keys is, say, "invoice number" and someone suddenly wonders why one record is "missing," it can create a lot of extra work.

There is *tons* of discussion on the list on this topic and the general consensus has been for years that it it never, *ever* a good idea to have PKs or FKs with a meaning - neither explicit like the SSN nor implicit like the "holes" in the "order" of invoice numbers. And this is not special to WO anyway. I will not recap this but rather advise you to check the archives.

I didn't say it was a good idea, just that it was a possible downside.

--
_Deirdre http://deirdre.net
"Cannot run out of time. There is infinite time. You are finite. Zathras is finite. This....is wrong tool." -- Zathras
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References: 
 >Re: assigning primary key on insertion (From: email@hidden (Anjo Krank))

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