Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you clarify how autogenerated keys are different from an autoincrement id column? In my experience, the autogenerated keys are built on top of auto-increment columns. Of course, if you use a stored procedure or something to generate a value, then you're just using a unique ID, same as anything else, but making your system dependent on the DB, which isn't awesome if you have a distributed system with replication a…
I might have missed something upthread but autogenerated keys to me just mean that the key is somehow generated automatically for you rather than using a natural key like social security number (SSAN) when inserting rows. Autoincrement IDs are one way of autogenerating a key that delegates generation to the DBMS server. To expand on this, there are three common approaches to create automatic keys in SQL applications.…
Also, SSN is a terrible key [1] and getting uniqueness without central coordination can be done with UUIDv4 or ksuid [2], as long as you have a reasonably trustworthy source of randomness
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26776092
[2] https://github.com/segmentio/ksuid/blob/master/README.md