Database developers often disagree about whether it’s better to use naturally occurring data or meaningless values as a table’s primary key. Technically, there is no right or wrong to this ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

The primary keys provide administrator level access to Cosmos DB instances with full read/write/delete permissions. The database service also requires users to have secondary keys as well to make ...