[kayodelycaon]

Natural primary keys (email, ssns, etc) was the standard for a long time. It was some kind of platonic ideal. Artificial keys were wasted space of random data that didn’t belong in a database.

When I was in college, academics were just starting to grudgingly accept artificial primary keys (like UUID or auto-incrementing integers) as a concession to reality.

To a modern developer natural primary keys sound insane. Artificial keys are faster in almost every way due to index size. You’re storing compact, fixed-size binary data instead of strings.

[prepend]

I’ve been professionally making database since 1997 and “natural” primary keys was an antipattern even back then (along with the int sequence since it only allowed 2 or 4 billion).

Socials change. Emails change. Seemingly natural, unchanging things change and mess up all the foreign key relationships.