Re: PRIMARY KEYS

On Thursday, May 22, 2003, at 11:43 AM, wsheldah(at)lexmark(dot)com wrote:

>
> Choosing an artificial key is the ideal, according to everything I've
> heard. In one of my database classes, I remember I had a classmate who
> had
> worked with some very large datasets of U.S. citizens, and found that
> there
> were actually duplicate social security numbers assigned to different
> people. Not many, and I don't recall whether the first person had died
> before the SSN was reused, but it really goes to show that they only to
> _guarantee_ a unique primary key is to generate it yourself. Yes, you
> may
> want to put a unique index on your SSN field or other candidate key
> fields
> that ought to be unique.
>
> [snip]

Wouldn't one wish to know, and deal with, a situation where a business
rule -- each person has a unique social security number -- has been
violated? If you're a business doing tax withholding for employees,
isn't this a critical question?