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Asked: 2026-05-26T06:53:50+00:00

I have a problem with assigning a primary key in one of the tables

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I have a problem with assigning a primary key in one of the tables containing employee info. There is no unique column in that table, The only option I am left with is taking combination of three columns as a primary key.

  1. But it gives a warning message as Warning! The maximum key length is 900 bytes. The index 'pk_hrempid' has maximum length of 1530 bytes.For some combination of large values, the insert/update operation will fail I came to know that this would be a major problem in the future for inserting the data. Is there a solution for this warning?

  2. Other question is can I put an auto-increment value as a unique id, is it recommended? I want to make sure that it does not give problems in the future as I have many tables containing employee info from the other departments. Some employees may be present in two or more tables

Any help is appreciated!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Whilst is it sounds from your attempt at a compound primary key that you’re attempting the best-practice of using a “natural key”, there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with using an auto-incrementing ID field.

    If your suggested fields are too large to be used as a key, perhaps they weren’t the best choice in the first place. Could you add another “natural” key column with a better datatype perhaps?

    Don’t forget to take into account the optimizations that are possible by choosing good indexes and suitable datatypes for tables that are going to be heavily-queried.

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