What is the difference between a surrogate key and a business key?

What is a business key?

A Business key is the column or set of columns that uniquely identifies each row in an entity. Through definitions of business keys, you guarantee that the information held in the key column (or columns) of each record will differentiate it from all the other records in the same entity (avoid duplicates).

What is surrogate key?

A surrogate key is a unique key for an entity in the client's business or for an object in the database. Sometimes natural keys cannot be used to create a unique primary key of the table. This is when the data modeler or architect decides to use surrogate or helping keys for a table in the LDM.

What is difference between surrogate key and natural key?

A primary key uniquely identifies each record within a table and relates records to additional data stored in other tables. A natural key might require several fields to accomplish a unique identity for each record. A surrogate key is unique in and of itself.

Why are surrogate keys better?

Surrogate Key Pros Better performance since key value is smaller. Less disk IO is required on when accessing single column indexes from an optimization perspective. Surrogate key is guaranteed to be unique.