Which makes for a better primary key: natural data points or meaningless values? Database developers have strong opinions on this facet of primary key design. This article settles the debate once ...

The column (field) in a relational database that uniquely identifies the row in the table. For example, account number is often a primary key. A "composite primary key" or "super key" is made up ...

10 tips for choosing between a surrogate and natural primary key Your email has been sent The superiority of surrogate versus natural keys is a hotly debated topic among database developers. Susan ...

Learn about SQLite database engine internals so you can simplify your code and improve the performance of your applications.

Some database designers may feel that it’s OK to arbitrarily assign all dimensional foreign keys as part of a fact’s primary key even when one or more do not actually contribute to the fact table’s ...

The original intention of surrogate keys across multidimensional database designs was to help optimize joins by keeping all keys, used for joining between facts and dimensions, both numeric and single ...

All documents in a MongoDB collection have a primary key dubbed _id . This field is automatically assigned to a document upon insert, so there’s rarely a need to provide it. What’s interesting ...

Duplicate and Ignore on MySQL Inserts. MySQL table primary keys and unique indexes prevent multiple rows with the same index from being added to the table. If you try to insert a duplicate row ...