Faceoff: Surrogate vs. Natural Keys

Abstract. The natural and surrogate key architectures are two competing approaches to specifying keys in relational databases. We analyze the performance of these approaches with respect to the update complexity and the query data and expression complexity. Our results provide new insights into the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ADBIS
• Authors: Slavica Aleksic, Milan Celikovic, Sebastian Link, Ivan Lukovic, Pavle Mogin
• Keywords: ADBIS 2010, Database, Expression Complexity, Surrogate Key Architectures, Update Complexity