Good Morning Everyone,
We are designing a set of tables for metadata and are wondering about the pros and cons for using the datetime stamp for the primary key of our tables. The reason it comes up that everyone wants to know when the data was received and so since the primary key would get migrated to the child/detail tables, it seems like an easy way to let everyone know when the records are recieved, since all they'd have to do is select the primary key.
However me and some others believe the primary key should either be the unique business representation of the entity and records, or should be a sequence number generated as a surrogate for the business key (which could be a compound key of multiple columns).
Your thoughts and discussion are welcome as are pointers to other references where this topic is covered.
Thanks in advance for your time and attention.
