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

date posted 22nd November 2007 13:15

Gary Short wrote:
> On 22 Nov 2007 01:50:46 -0000, Carrie wrote
>> sorry but Gary's holier than thou stuff is starting to get on my nerves.
>
> 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?!
>
> In the future I shall try to express myself in a less "holier than thou" way
> so as not to offend Carrie's sensibilities.
>
>

Sorry Gary - the post was clearly marked OT and flippant,

"Holier than thou" was a bit strong.

it seems that we have struck a rich vein of discussion, and strongly
held views.

I always use an auto increment id field in every table, whether I use
it as part of the logic or not.

I guess that is because I started writing databases in Dbase (3), and
then wrote an auction house system (1991) using a commercially available
library of c routines, which was a reverse engineer of dbase, without
the front end.

My database skills have come on a long way from that but old habits die
hard.

The problem with a natural primary key is as others have pointed out
that it is prone to problems in terms of uniqueness.


Still gutted about the England result.

Carrie