Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 03/12/06 17:07

David Portas (REMOVE_BEFORE_REPLYING_dportas@acm.org) writes:
>> Thus, it is not the right thing to say in a newsgroup that you should
>> not use IDENTITY. Maybe it was a poor database design. Maybe there were
>> time constraints in the project. Whatever, it's not our business.
>
> I didn't say don't use IDENTITY. I said it shouldn't be the only key.
> That's good advice in any situation as I think the OP's problem
> demonstrates. IDENTITY is still useful as a surrogate key and I'm not
> against that.

Whether you say "don't use IDENTITY" or "don't use IDENTITY without a
candidate key" does not matter as long as you have no knowledge of the
business domain.
--
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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