>>Just because the largest ERP software vendor, SAP, does not have unique dedicated keys does not make it "right" -- it is only one way of doing it.
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>That is surprising to me. Microsoft's Northwind database had the same design flaw, so maybe SAP simply wanted to be "feature-by-feature competitive." Actually, Northwind also had a combined key somewhere in the design (a key consisting of two concatenated columns.)

These guys aren't any smarter or wiser than us. They only work for richer companies.

While extending some scripts to update SQL databases, I was surprised how convoluted, and obviously afterthought are some pieces of SQL server's metadata. Maybe there was never any time to refactor, or just clean up - which may as well have happened with SAP too. If you have a successful app, which is the bread and butter of the company, then its flaws are patched, worked around, but there's never time for a proper cleanup.

I sometimes wish there was a way to color lines of source by year... I must have a few lines which are 20 years old now. If there was a way to look at SAP's code or SQL's... I guess the number of colors required would be even larger.