Re: surrogate key or not?

hello

> This reminds me of a project I worked on many years ago, I was pretty much
> fresh out of university writing a system for a large medical practice -
> itwas principally for accounting purposes. I made lots of suggestions like
> Josh's, only to get replies like Karsten's. I the progammer wanted to
> codify everything so as to enable data analysis (ie linking complaints and
> diagnosis, etc) but the doctors wern't interested. They just wanted to
> write free text comments. And the reason for it (as far as I can tell) is
> the distinction between general practice and reseach (such as
> epidemiology). So (GPs) are not so much searching for new knowlege in their
> patients records, as applying the knowlege gained from research (done by
> researchers) to treat individual patients.

Here the situation quite similar, a customer dictate drives the practice far
far from logic.

EVERY database i had desined in few years have been turned into a container of
textual MEMOs completely unstructured. (because of patches and makeups)

USER DO NOT WANT TO TAKE CARE OF THEIR INPUT.

i do not know how are you all programming, really hope you are in defferent
circumstances. Here a customer itself is a user and itself is a [man who
formulate a problem] then every stupid idea to simplify input immediately
turns to an urgent official order to do.

Sorry. That is my work.

Thank you all again for very usefull discussion on Surrogate Keys.