Effects of the Use of Non-Natural Keys on Query Performance in Relational Databases

Mitko Radoev

Economic Alternatives, 2013, issue 4, 73-76

Abstract: Choosing a primary key is of a particular importance in the design of a relational database. What are the possible keys, i.e. which columns or combinations of columns are candidate keys? Which of these candidate keys is best suited for a primary key? For quite some time, a trend is gaining more popularity for choosing a primary key - not to use the existing columns of the relationship but to create new, additional column to ensure the uniqueness and to act as a primary key. Recently it became a common practice to use artificial or surrogate identifiers, even in cases where the relationships already have perfectly suited natural identifiers. Using artificial keys is motivated mainly by practical considerations - the keys are shorter, do not have cascade update when changing the key, queries run faster etc. Does using of non-natural keys really increase the performance of the database? This study is testing what is happening with the database in adopting one or the other approach.

Keywords: primary key; natural key; non-natural key; query performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.unwe.bg/uploads/Alternatives/a08.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nwe:eajour:y:2013:i:4:p:73-76

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Alternatives from University of National and World Economy, Sofia, Bulgaria Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vanya Lazarova ().