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 ...

To link databases together to create a relational database, a foreign key is used. A foreign key is a field in one table that is linked to the primary key in another table.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Every JPA entity has a primary key, but some entities have more than one value as their primary key. In this case, you need to use a composite key. This Java tip introduces you to using composite ...