I have a question regarding this database design. I am a bit unsure of the difference between identifying and non-identifying relationships in a database leading me to some puzzles in my head.
I have this database design: (kind of like a movie rental stores. “friend” are those who borrow the movie. “studio” is the production studios that collaborated in making the movie.)
I somewhat understand how it works. However, I was wondering what if I create a loan_id in the loan table, and use movie_id and friend_id as normal foreign keys?
Some of my questions are:
What are the advantages or disadvantages of the later approach?
A situation where the initial or later model is better?
Does the initial model enable a friend to borrow a movie more than once?
Any thorough explanation would be much appreciated.
The way you have all of your many-to-many tables (tables collaboration, loan, role), is called a composite primary key: Where two (or more) columns form a unique value.
When you have a composite pk, a lot of db designers prefer to create a surrogate primary key (like your proposed loan_id). I’m one of them. This post does a good job going through the arguments of why or why not: Composite primary keys versus unique object ID field.
My relatively simple reason for it, is composite keys tend to grow: Using the loan example, what happens if that movies loaned more than once? Using the composite approach, you would then have to add loan_date to the composite key.
What if you then wanted to track re-loans of some sort? You would then have to have a 2nd table carrying all the composite pk fields from the loan table (original_loan_movie_id, original_loan_friend_id, original_loan_date) just to refer to the original loan…