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

date posted 26th November 2007 21:03

On Saturday 24 November 2007 23:28:50 Richard Harrison wrote:

> To give an example, years ago an excellent bug was eventually traced
> down to confusion between an autoincrement field and a second natural ID
> field.

Interesting stuff.

I think that you have a very valid point about unthinkingly giving every table
an auto-incrementing ID key - but on the other hand this bug wouldn't have
been a bug if some decent field names had been used, and I still fail to see
any harm in using an auto-increment as a debugging tool if nothing else.
In this case it could have been called "creation_id" and there would have
been no confusion.

In other words think carefully about your table design - something I'm sure
we all agree on.