Re: IS it a good practice to use SERIAL as Primary Key?

From: "Joshua D(dot) Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
To: Scott Ribe <scott_ribe(at)killerbytes(dot)com>
Cc: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: IS it a good practice to use SERIAL as Primary Key?
Date: 2006-11-27 22:36:36
Message-ID: 1164666996.6398.1.camel@localhost.localdomain
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On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 14:36 -0700, Scott Ribe wrote:
> > insert a new address, and update the users table to the new address_id
>
> Which changes the user's "primary key". My point was that having the address
> id be part of the primary key is wrong.

As I said, you don't *have* to do it that way. I was just giving an
example. You could just as easily grab the address id, insert that into
an archive table with a date stamp and then just update the address
itself. Thus *not* changing the "Primary Key".

Joshua D. Drake

> Having it be a part of a key may be
> fine for many uses. But it's contrary to the notion of primary key that
> something that not only can, but will, change for many records should be
> part of the primary key. "Unique" and "primary" are *not* synonyms.
>
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