Human Beings Do Not Have A Primary Key
summary
Claim: personal names are not database primary keys and common first/last fields break globally. Demonstrates APIs that demand first/last, credit-card endpoints that strip Unicode, and legal edge cases (TSA needs M/F, HIPAA > PCI, Social Security numbers become fraud targets). Recommends ask what to be called, preserve whitespace and punctuation, accept non‑alphabetic characters, prefer store less, ask only what you need, model groups by business rules (limit size) rather than families, and consider use UUIDs for identifiers.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Introduction to data modeling
- 1:03The complexities of naming
- 4:21Cultural naming variations
- 7:23Titles and addresses
- 9:41Designing for business needs
- 12:52Handling payments and names
- 14:40Gender in data modeling
- 18:27Modeling family structures
- 24:50Birthdays and data security
- 27:06Handling sensitive medical data
- 29:42Core database principles
- 36:22Q&A and final thoughts
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