posted 14 years ago
Hi raj,
as far as I know a surrogate key is a special kind of a primary key. It will be used if there is no primary key available.
e.g. if I have the database table "Employees" and every employee in my company has a unique employee signon (or number,etc.) I could use this as the primary key for table employees. This would be a so called natural key. If no unique identificaton is available (or if the unique identification consists of many attributes) an "artificial" attribute can be added to the table as a primary key, holding a value which e.g.comes from a sequence.
Such an artificial pk attribute is called surrogate key...
Did this help you?
John