Friday, December 3, 2010

keys

Primary key
  • an attribute/column which uniquely identifies a record
  • primary key can be column/combination of columns
  • primary key cannot have null values

Candidate key

  • Candidate key is a column which is not a primary key, but it can qualify as a primary key
  • there can be multiple candidate key in one table

alternate key

  • any of the candidate key that is not part of primary key

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