Re: FN-FORUM: [OT] flippancy - What's the best development platform for creating Web 2.0 business applications?

date posted 22nd November 2007 09:03



Gary Short wrote:
> Well if I come across as "holier than thou" I appologise. However, stating
> that you shouldn't use an auto-incrementing integer field as a primary key,
> and instead you should *always* use a field natural to the row, is just
> wrong - please tell me I'm not the only person on this entire forum who
> knows that?!
>
>
First of all some databases did not up, until recently, support
auto-increment. This as much as anything shows it was a feature of a DB
and not a general premise of database design.

Good relational database design usually does involve some normalisation
to 3rd normal form (but not religiously).

I do agree though that "*always* use a field natural to the row" is not
correct. (e.g. I would not use the username as the key in a user table.
I would create a user_id column and mark that as auto-increment )

I think people may be getting a bit excited over this. :)