Surrogate keys v/s natural keys

I am currently working on a database design problem. I work in the financial domain and I deal with data related to benchmarks and securities. The problem with such databases are that each security has multiple identifiers in the real world. They could be Uniquely identified by a SEDOL, CUSIP or ISIN or the many other type of identification standards available. This lead me to the question of designing the tables using a surrogate keys but I was still not sure how my team would react as they had already design loads based on real world identifiers and named it security_id....

July 18, 2012 · 3 min · 472 words