Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 03/12/06 01:28

David Portas (REMOVE_BEFORE_REPLYING_dportas@acm.org) writes:
> You said "data" so you could be right. If you'd said "information"
> you'd be wrong. Here's an analogy. If I have two copies of "Inside SQL
> Server" on my bookshelf do I have more information than if I have one
> copy of that book? Now if I write 1 on the cover of the first book and
> 2 on the cover of the second, do I have any more information? So should
> I spend money and storage space on two books or one? The smart money is
> invested in information not in data.

Then again, you could have scribbled notes in one of the copies, and
the other could have Kalen's highly valuable autograph.

More importantly, there is data - or information - out there that
users want to - and need to - deal with, despite that we cannot define
a unique key for them. You already know the prime example too well:
customers.



--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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