natural-key

I've seen a few similar questions to this on SO, but none seem to answer my particular problem. I'm new to Django and was guiding myself by the instructions at this page to allow myself to use natural keys to load fixtures. Nevertheless, I'm getting Deserialization errors because Django wants an integer for a foreign key and can't seem to map my natural key to an integer primary key as is noted in the instructions. Specifically, my relevant models code is: class GraphTypeManager(models.Manager): def get_by_natural_key(self, type): return self.get(type=type) class GraphType(models.Model): type

While reading through the Hibernate documentation, I keep seeing references to the concept of a natural identifier . Does this just mean the id an entity has due to the nature of the data it holds? E.g. A user's name + password + age + something are used as a compound identitifier? In Hibernate, natrual keys are often used for lookups. You will have an auto-generated surrogate id in most cases. But this id is rather useless for lookups, as you'll always query by fields like name, social security number or anything else from the real world. When using Hibernate's caching features, this

Which one is the best practice and Why ? a) Type Table, Surrogate/Artificial Key Foreign key is from user.type to type.id : b) Type Table, Natural Key Foreign key is from user.type to type.typeName : I believe that in practice, using a natural key is rarely the best option. I would probably go for the surrogate key approach as in your first example. The following are the main disadvantages of the natural key approach: You might have an incorrect type name, or you may simply want to rename the type. To edit it, you would have to update all the tables that would be using it as a foreign key. An