Some database designers may feel that it’s OK to arbitrarily assign all dimensional foreign keys as part of a fact’s primary key even when one or more do not actually contribute to the fact table’s ...

The column (field) in a relational database that uniquely identifies the row in the table. For example, account number is often a primary key. A "composite primary key" or "super key" is made up ...

10 tips for choosing between a surrogate and natural primary key Your email has been sent The superiority of surrogate versus natural keys is a hotly debated topic among database developers. Susan ...

Generated keys can be a useful tool in creating logical database designs, but they can be easily over-used. The designer must consider whether the business truly wishes to drive a function that ...

To link databases together to create a relational database, a foreign key is used. A foreign key is a field in one table that is linked to the primary key in another table.

All documents in a MongoDB collection have a primary key dubbed _id . This field is automatically assigned to a document upon insert, so there’s rarely a need to provide it. What’s interesting ...

Every JPA entity has a primary key, but some entities have more than one value as their primary key. In this case, you need to use a composite key. This Java tip introduces you to using composite ...