On Fri, Feb 22, 2019 at 6:11 AM Kevin J Cully kjcully@cherokeega.com wrote: <snip>
I had a potential client where they based their primary keys based on employee Social Security Numbers. They didn't like it when I told them that they'd need a complete rewrite. Notice this would have been the case no matter what language/technology they were using. It was just piss poor design.
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I must confess.... I did this once and used SSN's as a primary key. It is my shame....
I was told I had a year and a half to write a enterprise wide application and out of the blue the reality was I had about 3 weeks, and failure would have cost millions and millions... oh - and my job...
I was panicked and the first thing I thought to use was the SSN thinking that certainly they wouldn't be changing so as a PK would be handy to use. I went for it w/o thinking it through...
Granted, this was back in the day when the internet wasn't what we think of today, but still - it was a really dumb dumb idea I always regretted...