Re: [GENERAL] Sufficient Primary Key?

On Fri, 24 Jul 1998, Dan Delaney wrote:

> I'm working on a library catalog and trying to decide what to use
> for the primary key for the authors. Do you think that the first
> three letters of first and last name with the birth year would be
> sufficient (e.g., Alan Watts would be ALAWAT1915). So, essentially,
> do you think there there would ever be two authors with the same
> first and last name AND the same birth year? I really don't want to
> inject the middle name into there because I can't find the middle
> name (or even middle initial) of most authors!

You can do multi-column keys in PostgreSQL, I believe, which is
essentially what you would be doing by combining that data into a single
column.

BTW, Alan Watts is a favourite of mine.

Brett W. McCoy
http://www.lan2wan.com/~bmccoy
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"The Number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected."
-- The UNIX Programmer's Manual, 2nd Edition, June, 1972