Antipattern: One Size Fits All

Let's see some caveats of using database keys traditionally.

Books, articles, and programming frameworks have established a cultural convention that every database table must have a primary key column with the following characteristics:

  • The primary key’s column name is id.

  • Its data type is a 32-bit or 64-bit integer.

  • Unique values are generated automatically.

The presence of a column named id in every table is so common that this has become synonymous with a primary key. Programmers learning SQL get the false idea that a primary key always means a column defined in this manner.

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