Re: FN-FORUM: What's the best development platform for creating Web 2.0 business applications?

date posted 21st November 2007 15:03

On Wed, 2007-11-21 at 15:02 +0000, Dom Latter wrote:
> On Wednesday 21 November 2007 11:28:59 Richard Harrison wrote:
>
> > This is really where I came in. Not all of my tables have a single ID
> > field, and I prefer not to use autonumber fields.
>
> Why on earth not?

A couple of Wikipedia articles show what I imagine Richard is trying to
do:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_normalization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referential_integrity


This is what SQL was originally designed for: to put as much of the
logic of the system you are modelling in the database itself, rather
than higher up in the applications that use it.

I've seen some quite scary pieces of SQL posted for debugging to this
group, and many of the problems I've seen appear to me to have their
roots in the single auto-incremented id meme.

Graham


> I tend to stick an auto-increment ID and a timestamp on *everything* - useful
> for debugging.