Terry Reedy wrote: > "John Salerno" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >> John Machin wrote: >> >>> Here in Austraila, (I expect this is common to most countries), there >>> are people who are utterly clueless about elementary data model rules, >>> like identification "numbers" should be kept as strings. >> Do you mean that ID numbers that serve as a primary key in a database >> should also be strings? > > If you mean user-entered data like social security, phone, account, part, > or postal code 'numbers' -- as opposed to internal db-generated numbers > that the user never sees -- this I would presume 'yes'. > The modern trend is to use such values as alternate keys, and to have all tables use an automatically-allocated integer (autoincrement, identity, sequence) field as the primary key.
Unfortunately some applications are getting such large tables that a 32-bit field is insufficient to enumerate all existing and deleted rows. Then you have to start keeping tables of unused primary keys. regards Steve -- Steve Holden +44 150 684 7255 +1 800 494 3119 Holden Web LLC/Ltd http://www.holdenweb.com Skype: holdenweb http://holdenweb.blogspot.com Recent Ramblings http://del.icio.us/steve.holden -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
