Re: Surrogate VS natural keys

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:

> While true in this simple case, it can quickly become more complicated if
> your relationship starts gaining attributes. For example, if you add start
> and stop dates, so the (player,club) combination is not unique anymore. If
> you track invoices, games or scores it may be easier to reference the
> relatioship via a surrogate key rather than copying the other IDs around
> everywhere.

That's very true, Martijn. It did not seem to be the case in the original
post. When you add a time history and need to identify a player's team at a
specified point in time, it gets much more complicated. That's when reading
Rick Snodgrass' book helps a lot.

Rich

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