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

date posted 22nd November 2007 09:13


>
> 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. :)
>

This is bang-on, and puts in much better than I did.

Graham

>