Specifying a Primary Key with PRIMARY KEY
I described primary keys in “Primary Keys” in Chapter 2, but I’ll review the basics here:
A primary key uniquely identifies each row in a table.
No two rows can have the same primary-key value.
Primary keys don’t allow nulls.
Each table has exactly one primary key.
A primary key is a column or a set of columns. A simple primary key comprises a single column; a composite primary key comprises multiple columns.
In a composite key, values can be duplicated within one column, but each combination of values from all the key’s columns must be unique.
A table can have more than one combination of columns that uniquely identify its rows; each combination is a candidate key. The database designer picks one of the candidate ...
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