SQL Antipatterns, Volume 1

Antipattern: One Size Fits All

Books, articles, and programming frameworks have established a cultural convention that every database table must have a primary key column with the following characteristics:

• The primary key’s column name is id.
• Its data type is a 32-bit or 64-bit integer.
• Unique values are generated automatically.

The presence of a column named id in every table is so common that this has become synonymous with a primary key. Programmers learning SQL get the false idea that a primary key always means a column defined in this manner.

ID-Required/anti/id-ubiquitous.sql

​CREATE​ ​TABLE​ Bugs (
  id          ​SERIAL​ ​PRIMARY​ ​KEY​,
  description ​VARCHAR​(1000),
  ​-- . . .​
);

Adding an