
Database Design and Windows Azure Data Storage ◾ 41
value of StudentID identifies an instance of the entity STUDENT, which is an individual student.
Sometimes, an identifier may consist of more than one attribute, for example, a combination of
the first name and last name.
When an identifier can uniquely distinguish each individual entity instance, it is called a key.
In general, an identifier does not have to be unique. For example, if the last name attribute is used
as an identifier, there may be several students that have the same last name. When there is no attri-
bute in an entity that can serve as a unique identifier, you can use a sequence of ...