Twitter Wars! Natural vs Surrogate Keys

So much emotion for so little reason. Let's finally decide what is the best key to use when designing your databases.
Follow me!
blog: connor-mcdonal...
twitter: / connor_mc_d
The Podcast!
podcasts.apple...
open.spotify.c...
Subscribe for new tech videos every week
Other social media channels here: linktr.ee/connor
Music: The Wine, The Cars, Ah! Montmartre! - Late Night Feeler
#sql #database

[@IanBond007]

Excellent, the pragmatic approach to mixing surrogate and natural keys is a winner.

[@rydmerlin]

I’ve seen both approaches and I far prefer surrogate keys when working with ORM. However they have their downsides and those are that data is less mobile between environments but I much prefer writing joins using a surrogate key than a natural key.

[@berndeckenfels]

I agree with mixing, surrogate keys for entities and natural keys for lookups or dimensions. Sometimes it’s a bit blurry, like having a natural identifier (hr Id, order Id) #TeamUUID

[@donschussolini792]

But what about your gender example with natural key in an Multi-lingual application? In germany we have w / m / d - in such cases a Natural key will have a greater impact than surrogate keys.

[@berndeckenfels]

Totally legit reenactment of Twitter discussions on the topic

[@DatabaseDude]

its a documentary :-)

[@toomuchtube]

This information is spot on. I don't why it must be one vs the other, and this argument has been going on for ages. There is a place for both. Now let's get even more in the weeds: UUID or Sequence?

[@DatabaseDude]

plus the fact that there are now multiple types, sizes and formats for UUIDs now