Re: disabling OIDs?

On Sunday 02 January 2005 08:24, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 01, 2005 at 06:35:30PM -0800, Jeff Davis wrote:
> > On Sun, 2004-12-12 at 20:25 -0800, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
> > > OK, thanks. So is there any real benefit in doing this in a generic
> > > (non-dspam) sense, or is it just a hack that wouldn't be noticable?
> > > Any risks or potential problems down the line?
> >
> > I'd just like to add that some 3rd party applications/interfaces make
> > use of OIDs, as a convenient id to use if there is no primary key (or if
> > the 3rd party software doesn't take the time to find the primary key).
> >
> > One might argue that those 3rd party applications/interfaces are broken,
> > but you still might want to keep OIDs around in case you have a use for
> > one of those pieces of software.
>
> Yep, especially since an OID is not a unique value and so can't
> possibly be a primary key and generally isn't indexed either. Even
> Access asks you to identify the primary key...

Of course some 3rd party apps are nice and they look for a primary key first,
then a unique index, then look for an oid. Furthermore the really clueful
ones will check # of affected rows = 1 when modifying by oid, so its pretty
safe.

--
Robert Treat
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL