Jonathan,

Yes of course, that's what hmbacon is saying. Not to identify and implement the natural keys would be a serious mistake. Natural keys are almost essential and it's difficult to...

Some great points there, hmbacon. The problems you describe happen when developers look at things only in the abstract and lose sight of the fact that databases succeed or fail...

Hi Rick,

Did you misread me? I didn't say without DBMS, I said the innovative stuff tends not to use SQL DBMS, meaning the traditional SQL-only engines made by Oracle, Microsoft...

Agreed. Elasticity rather than cost is very often the clincher when it comes to cloud. But whether cloud or on-prem it seems to me that most of the interesting and...

Hi Roger,

Maybe this off-topic part of the discussion has gone on a bit too long, but on a matter of terminology, maybe you might make yourself clearer if you avoided...

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by nova.

Thanks X. There is a (perhaps understandable) tendency for technologists like us to stick with "patterns" as a substitute for the more fundamental issues. Sometimes you have to deal with...

However, while that is certainly true and very valuable to companies of that size, most companies will never come close to needing the requirements that Amazon, EBay, and other...

However,  all of the important innovations in data management over the last 6-10 years have happened outside the core "SQL DBMS" space. I suspect that will continue to...

There's definitely truth in the idea that a wave of tools aimed at generalist users (e.g. Notebooks like Jupyter and Zeppelin; platforms like DataIku) are continuing to broaden the scope...

A key is a key whether it is implemented using a PRIMARY KEY constraint, UNIQUE constraint or other means. Referential integrity is something else because not all keys are referenced...

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by nova.

Hi Steve

Natural keys serve a very different purpose to surrogates so it's pretty meaningless to say one is "superior" to the other. You will need both. If my patients are...

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by nova.

My example of merging data was a scenario where the old system was being discontinued and the target system had to do the job of both. That was why it...

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by nova.

Suppose I have to merge data from two systems which happen to have conflicting surrogate primary key values even though they represent...

Roger, I agree with nearly all you have said but when I said before that natural keys could be unique but mutable you said you "vehemently" disagreed with me! Perhaps...

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by nova.
• This reply was modified 6 years ago by nova.

You already said, and I agree, that login names can change. Similarly customer account numbers, so those are two relatively common cases of keys that may need to be updated....

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by nova.