Why use multiple columns as primary keys (composite primary key)

Question

Your understanding is correct.

You would do this in many cases. One example is in a relationship like OrderHeader and OrderDetail. The PK in OrderHeader might be OrderNumber. The PK in OrderDetail might be OrderNumber AND LineNumber. If it was either of those two, it would not be unique, but the combination of the two is guaranteed unique.

The alternative is to use a generated (non-intelligent) primary key, for example in this case OrderDetailId. But then you would not always see the relationship as easily. Some folks prefer one way; some prefer the other way.

Another example of compound primary keys are the usage of Association tables. Suppose you have a person table that contains a set of people and a group table that contains a set of groups. Now you want to create a many to many relationship on person and group. Meaning each person can belong to many groups. Here is what the table structure would look like using a compound primary key.

Create Table Person(
PersonID int Not Null,
FirstName varchar(50),
LastName varchar(50),
Constraint PK_Person PRIMARY KEY (PersonID))

Create Table Group (
GroupId int Not Null,
GroupName varchar(50),
Constraint PK_Group PRIMARY KEY (GroupId))

Create Table GroupMember (
GroupId int Not Null,
PersonId int Not Null,
CONSTRAINT FK_GroupMember_Group FOREIGN KEY (GroupId) References Group(GroupId),
CONSTRAINT FK_GroupMember_Person FOREIGN KEY (PersonId) References Person(PersonId),
CONSTRAINT PK_GroupMember PRIMARY KEY (GroupId, PersonID))

The W3Schools example isn't saying when you should use compound primary keys, and is only giving example syntax using the same example table as for other keys.

Their choice of example is perhaps misleading you by combining a meaningless key (P_Id) and a natural key (LastName). This odd choice of primary key says that the following rows are valid according to the schema and are necessary to uniquely identify a student. Intuitively this doesn't make sense.

1234     Jobs
1234     Gates

Further Reading: The great primary-key debate or just Google meaningless primary keys or even peruse this SO question

FWIW - My 2 cents is to avoid multi-column primary keys and use a single generated id field (surrogate key) as the primary key and add additional (unique) constraints where necessary.

You use a compound key (a key with more than one attribute) whenever you want to ensure the uniqueness of a combination of several attributes. A single attribute key would not achieve the same thing.

Yes, they both form the primary key. Especially in tables where you don't have a surrogate key, it may be necessary to specify multiple attributes as the unique identifier for each record (bad example: a table with both a first name and last name might require the combination of them to be unique).

Multiple columns in a key are going to, in general, perform more poorly than a surrogate key. I prefer to have a surrogate key and then a unique index on a multicolumn key. That way you can have better performance and the uniqueness needed is maintained. And even better, when one of the values in that key changes, you don't also have to update a million child entries in 215 child tables.

Your second question

How many columns can be used together as a primary key in a given table?

is implementation specific: it's defined in the actual DBMS being used.^[1],[2],[3] You have to inspect the technical specification of the database system you use. Some are very detailed, some are not. Searching the web about such limitations can be hard because the terminology varies. The term composite primary key should be mandatory ;)

If you cannot find explicit information, try creating a test database to ensure you can expect stable (and specific) handling of the limit violations (which are to be expected). Be careful to get the right information about this: sometimes the limits are accumulated, and you'll see different results with different database layouts.

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• ^[1]sql - Composite primary key limit? - Stack Overflow
• ^[2]SQL Server - Max columns per primary key
• ^[3]How many maximum number of columns can be part of Primary Key in a table in Oracle 9i and 10g?