Can A Primary Key Be Generated From Several Existing Field

Jul 18, 2019  Technically Yes you can do that provided that it’s a composite primary key and it actually makes sense in some cases. SQL PRIMARY KEY Constraint. The PRIMARY KEY constraint uniquely identifies each record in a table. Primary keys must contain UNIQUE values, and cannot contain NULL values. A table can have only ONE primary key; and in the table, this primary key can consist of single or multiple columns (fields). How many characters can be stored in a field with a Long Text data type? 64,000 If you add a table with 10 records to a query and add an unrelated table with 4 records to the same query, since this performs a positive match for each of the 10 records multiplied by the number of records in the unrelated table, how many records will display when. Typically, you associate a primary key field (see 'Configuring a JPA Entity Simple Primary Key Field') with a primary key value generator so that when an entity instance is created, a new, unique primary key value is assigned automatically. Table 7-2 lists the types of primary key value generators that you can define.

  1. Can A Primary Key Be Generated From Several Existing Field In One
  2. Can A Primary Key Be Generated From Several Existing Fields
  3. Can A Primary Key Be Generated From Several Existing Field In Word
  4. Can A Primary Key Be Generated From Several Existing Field In Outlook
Can a primary key be generated from several existing fields

This article demonstrates how to add a primary key to an existing table in SQL Server using Transact-SQL.

For a relational database like PostgreSQL, it could widely be considered a sin among developers not to include a primary key in every table. It is therefore crucial that you do your utmost to add that all-important primary key column to every table, and thankfully Postgres provides two methods for accomplishing this task.

A primary key is a column that has been configured as the unique identifier for a given table.

You would normally create a primary key constraint when you create the table, but you can also add a primary key to an existing table.

Note that a table can only have one primary key. So you can’t add a primary key if the table already has one.

Also primary keys can only be added to columns that are defined as NOT NULL.

Example 1 – Add a Primary Key Constraint

In this example I create a table, but I forget to add a primary key constraint. So I then go back and alter the table to have a primary key.

Create the table (but forget to create a primary key):

Result:

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Oops – I forgot to create the primary key!

No problem! We can add one now:

Result:

This has now added a PRIMARY KEY constraint for the ColorId column.

Example 2 – Check the Primary Key Constraint

Can A Primary Key Be Generated From Several Existing Field In One

Let’s run the following code to return a list of primary key constraints in the database:

Result:

Your results will be different, depending on the primary keys in your database.

Also note that this system view returns more columns than what I’ve specified here, but you can use the * wildcard to return all columns if you wish.

Example 3 – Adding a Primary Key to a Column that allows NULL Values

A primary key can only be added to columns that are defined as NOT NULL. If you try to add a primary key to a column that is nullable, you’ll get an error.

To demonstrate this, let’s create another table, but this time, we’ll also forget to specify the column as NOT NULL:

Existing

We can run the following query to check whether the column allows nulls or not:

Result:

We can see that the one we created earlier (in the Colors table) is nullable and is an identity column. The second one (in the Colors2 table) is nullable and is not an identity column.

Now let’s try to add a primary key constraint to the nullable column:

Result:

So in this case, we’ll need to alter the column to be NOT NULL before we try to define it as the primary key.

We can use ALTER COLUMN within an ALTER TABLE statement to set this column to NOT NULL:

Let’s check the column again:

Result:

So we can see that Colors2 is now set to 0, which means that it’s not nullable (it can’t contain NULL values).

Also take note that the column is not an identity column. I’ll discuss this later.

Anyway, now that the column is defined as NOT NULL we can go ahead and add the primary key:

Result:

To verify, let’s again check all primary key constraints for this table:

Result:

Our new primary key that we called PK_Colors2_ColorId has been added to the list.

Example 4 – Altering a Column to be an Identity Column

Primary keys are often applied to identity columns. Identity columns are defined as such with the IDENTITY keyword, followed by an optional seed and increment value within parentheses.

When a new row is added to the table, SQL Server provides a unique, incremental value for the identity column.

If you plan on using an identity column, you need to have done that already. You can’t alter an existing column to be an identity column.

When I ran the query earlier, we could see that the Colors2.ColorId column is not an identity column (we know this because is_identity is set to 0). This means I created the PK_Colors2_ColorId primary key on a non-identity column.

Here’s what happens if we try to alter the table to be an identity column:

Can A Primary Key Be Generated From Several Existing Fields

Result:

As mentioned, in order to overcome this, we need to drop the column and start again.

If the column already contains data, you’ll need to do some extra work. That’s outside the scope of this article, but here’s an example of dropping the above column and recreating it as an identity column:

Result:

Notice that I didn’t provide a name for the primary key constraint this time. In this case, the system will create a name for it.

Quickly check the column: Cd key warcraft 3.

Result:

Yes, it is now an identity column.

Let’s take another look at the primary keys for this table:

Can A Primary Key Be Generated From Several Existing Field In Word

Result:

Can A Primary Key Be Generated From Several Existing Field In Outlook

So we now have a system-named primary key called PK__Colors2__8DA7674D8F57294D.