Re: Enforce primary key on every table during dev?

On Thu, Mar 1, 2018 at 2:07 PM, Rakesh Kumar <rakeshkumar464@aol.com> wrote:

>
> >Adding a surrogate key to such a table just adds overhead, although that
> could be useful
> >in case specific rows need updating or deleting without also modifying
> the other rows with
> >that same data - normally, only insertions and selections happen on such
> tables though,
> >and updates or deletes are absolutely forbidden - corrections happen by
> inserting rows with
> >an opposite transaction.
>
> I routinely add surrogate keys like serial col to a table already having a
> nice candidate keys
> to make it easy to join tables.  SQL starts looking ungainly when you have
> a 3 col primary
> key and need to join it with child tables.
>
>
I was always of the opinion that a mandatory surrogate key (as you
describe) is good practice.
Sure there may be a unique key according to business logic (which may be
consist of those "ungainly" multiple columns), but guess what, business
logic changes, and then you're screwed! So using a primary key whose sole
purpose is to be a primary key makes perfect sense to me.