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john.lam
Starting Member
12 Posts |
 Posted - 2009-07-22 : 13:41:19
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| Hi all,If I have 6 columns in a table: RecordId, LocationId, Year, ActivityId, Nature and ProgramId, the combination of them represents a unique record in the table but the data in the individual columns may not be unique, in SQL Server 2005, should I assign Primary Key to each of these 6 columns as Composite Key or there is a better approach to it?Thanks!John Lam |
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russell
Pyro-ma-ni-yak
5072 Posts |
Posted - 2009-07-22 : 13:44:10
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| Depending on how you use (and query) the data, you may want to assign a surrogate PK. This menas adding an identity column and make that the PK. You will still want to enforce uniqueness over your natural key though.One advantage of the identity field is that it is much easier to handle in application code, where you are passing around one integer value rather than 6 values. |
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Primary Key/Composite Key