What is the use of surrogate key in SQL?

What is the purpose of surrogate key?

Software developers often use surrogate keys to business users to identify records. They are displayed on screens and printed on reports. However, surrogate keys are meaningless. They serve no purpose, except to technically identify a record uniquely in one source system.

What is a surrogate key in SQL?

A surrogate key is a system generated (could be GUID, sequence, unique identifier, etc.) value with no business meaning that is used to uniquely identify a record in a table. The key itself could be made up of one or multiple columns (i.e. Composite Key).

When would you use a surrogate key example?

Among the candidate keys, you choose one as the primary key of a table. For example, you can choose customer_id as the primary key of your table. If what you choose is not a nature key, but a system generated identifier, it is called surrogate key. Or we can say that you use a surrogate key” as the primary key.