If you've worked with relational database systems for any length of time, you've probably participated in a discussion (argument?) about the topic of this month's column, surrogate keys. A great ...

The superiority of surrogate versus natural keys is a hotly debated topic among database developers. Susan Harkins offers some insights into when -- and why -- you might choose one over the other.

Using surrogate keys within a database is often considered a technique to improve performance. The assumption is that using anything other than a numeric data value to join tables provides 'bad' ...