On Fri, 6 Jul 2001 11:14:48 -0600 (MDT), John Halleck wrote:
>> > [... Unique Record ID's ...]
>
>> > >http://rubens.its.unimelb.edu.au/~pgm/uisic/exchange/exchprop.html
>
> "nnnnn
> a numeric serial number, being an agreed fixed length for a given
> entity, and padded left with zeros. Unique within a given aa and
> bbb. See Entity List below for
> "
> Making the number field a fixed size puts in assumptions about sizes.
>
> Why do this? (I.E. I don't see any advantage to this, and there are
> obvious problems with it, so I think I missed something.)
I've always like a combination of numbers and characters for keys (ie. "A134BC"). The code is pretty simple to write but it
increases the keys for a given fixed size rather considerably! If the key was 3 digits long, there are then 46656 possible
combinations instead of 1000. I like to limit it to upper case to keep things a little simpler but lower case could be brought in
too.
- Richard Knapp
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