5 ms·
That’s surprising to hear. I have zero DB experience, not am I a developer, and my default assumption is that some UUID maps to object / entry containing email
by sedivy94 3y ago
That’s surprising to hear. I have zero DB experience, not am I a developer, and my default assumption is that some UUID maps to object / entry containing email address (and all other attributes).
- kayodelycaon 3y agoNatural primary keys (email, ssns, etc) was the standard for a long time. It was some kind of platonic ideal. Artificial keys were wasted space of random data that didn’t belong in a database. When I was in college, academics were just starting to grudgingly accept artificial primary keys (like UUID or auto-incrementing integers) as a concession to reality. To a modern developer natural primary keys sound insane. Artificial keys are faster in almost every way due to index size. You’re storing compact, fixed-size binary data instead of strings.
- prepend 3y agoI’ve been professionally making database since 1997 and “natural” primary keys was an antipattern even back then (along with the int sequence since it only allowed 2 or 4 billion). Socials change. Emails change. Seemingly natural, unchanging things change and mess up all the foreign key relationships.
- liquidpele 3y agoYou see it a lot with Java devs or others who think in OOP objects and then try to simply push those to a table. That said it’s a little more rare now, since most ORMs helpfully auto-creates PKs for you as an int or uuid.