[ciapug] Best Practice

[Claus]

On 1/24/2005 10:51 AM, Tim Perdue wrote:

> One thing you could do is set the auto-increment to, say, 10 for each of 
> the databases. Then, you start each database at a separate number: 
> database 1: the IDs start at 1, database 2: the IDs start at 2 and so 
> on. With the auto-increment set to 10, each database will have unique 
> IDs, so when you blend it back together in the master database, there 
> are no conflicts and you can easily tell which DB the data came from 
> originally.
> 
> That's probably the "best practice" for what you're doing.
> 
> Tim

To guarantee the uniqueness/database-identification I'd recommend adding 
a column with the server/database name.  To encode the database ID in a 
record ID is a bad practice in my opinion for multiple reasons:
1) Not easy to understand
2) You are fixed to a max of 10 servers
3) You can't easily query the data by server ID
4) Nobody said there is an auto-increment field.

The bottom line to best practice is to keep it simple.  I can recall a 
few times where I created really cool code but after something went 
wrong and I had to fix it things always turned out to be stupid code; 
way to complicated and hard to maintain.  At which point I replaced it 
with a way shorter, simpler and more effective code.
If the code or database layout is not easy to understand it's no-good. 
And don't do more than what is needed otherwise you are just adding 
complexity.

   Claus