Another Advantage of Surrogate Keys

Hey, Ted:

I agreed with most of your points on the use of surrogate keys ["Pros and Cons of Surrogate Keys"]. However, I think you missed one important advantage to their use.

Binary surrogate keys provide much smaller indexes and, therefore, much faster join performance than natural keys. For instance, if the compound business key ends up being 40 to 50 bytes long with 1 million entries, memory requirements for the index (a much more expensive consideration than DASD) are considerably greater than for a 5i 0 surrogate key value (or even a 9i 0).

Please keep up the useful discussions.

--Bill

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