We're not talking about whether or not a SSN uniquely identifies a person. We are talking about the process for changing up an incorrectly-entered natural primary key, for whatever reason that might be.
On Wed, Apr 4, 2012 at 9:36 AM, Durchholz, Joachim <joachim.durchh...@hennig-fahrzeugteile.de> wrote: > Seems like everybody is looking at the institutions that can't keep their > numbers constant. > > Give it a break. > Ordinal numbers of chemical elements cannot change, by definition. > I may be too optimistic about ISBNs and EANs. Haven't dealt with them and > don't know how reliable their issuers are. I guess if they are using their > own numbers in a PK in any table that's moderately important, they should > catch any duplicates before they make it into the wild. SSNs are issued > decentrally, so I'm not surprised they aren't unique; ID cards are issued > centrally and managed centrally, so the risk of getting caught in a goof-up > is considerably smaller. > > Oh, and if you're a company caught in the SSN goof-up, using a synthetic key > wouldn't have helped in the least. There is no better ID available when it > comes to US citizens, so if you're using data from external sources, your > data will be goofed up anyway. > Things are different if you never use the SSN in external communication to > other databases. However, even then you'll never know whether the persons > with the same SSN are the same (just changed name and location) or not; > there's no better way to identify US citizens, and a synthetic PK won't help > you much to resolve that kind of issue!
