I am very new to data modeling, and according to Microsoft's Entity Framework, tables without primary keys are not allowed and apparently a bad idea. I am trying to figure out why this is a bad idea, and how to fix my model so that I do not have this hole.
I have 4 tables in my current model: User, City, HelloCity, and RateCity. It is modeled as shown in the picture. The idea is that many users can visit many cities, and a user can only rate a city once, but they can greet a city many times. For this reason, I did not have a PK in HelloCity table.
Any insight as to how I can change this to comply with best practices, and why this is against best practices to begin with?
This response is mainly opinion/experience-based, so I'll list a few reasons that come to mind. Note that this is not exhaustive.
Here're some reasons why you should use primary keys (PKs):
They allow you to have a way to uniquely identify a given row in a table to ensure that there're no duplicates.
The RDBMS enforces this constraint for you, so you don't have to write additional code to check for duplicates before inserting, avoiding a full table scan, which implies better performance here.
PKs allow you to create foreign keys (FKs) to create relations between tables in a way that the RDBMS is "aware" of them. Without PKs/FKs, the relationship only exists inside the programmer's mind, and the referenced table might have a row with its "PK" deleted, and the other table with the "FK" still thinks the "PK" exists. This is bad, which leads to the next point.
It allows the RDBMS to enforce integrity constraints. Is TableA.id referenced by TableB.table_a_id? If TableB.table_a_id = 5 then, you're guaranteed to have a row with id = 5 in TableA. Data integrity and consistency is maintained, and that is good.
It allows the RDBMS to perform faster searches b/c PK fields are indexed, which means that a table doesn't need to have all of its rows checked when searching for something (e.g. a binary search on a tree structure).
In my opinion, not having a PK might be legal (i.e. the RDBMS will let you), but it's not moral (i.e. you shouldn't do it). I think you'd need to have extraordinarily good/powerful reasons to argue for not using a PK in your DB tables (and I'd still find them debatable), but based on your current level of experience (i.e. you say you're "new to data modeling"), I'd say it's not yet enough to attempt justifying a lack of PKs.
There're more reasons, but I hope this gives you enough to work through it.
As far as your M:M relations go, you need to create a new table, called an associative table, and a composite PK in it, that PK being a combination of the 2 PKs of the other 2 tables.
In other words, if there's a M:M relation between tables A and B, then we create a table C that has a 1:M relation to with both tables A and B. "Graphically", it'd look similar to:
+---+ 1 M +---+ M 1 +---+
| A |------| C |------| B |
+---+ +---+ +---+
With the C table PK somewhat like this:
+-----+
| C |
+-----+
| id | <-- C.id = A.id + B.id (i.e. combined/concatenated, not addition!)
+-----+
or like this:
+-------+
| C |
+-------+
| a_id | <--|
+-------+ +-- composite PK columns instead
| b_id | <--| of concatenation (recommended)
+-------+
Two primary reasons for a primary key:
To uniquely identify a record for later reference.
To join to other tables accurately and efficiently.
A primary key essentially tags a row with a unique identifier. This can be composed of one or more columns in a row but most commonly just uses one. Part of what makes this useful is when you have additional tables (such as the one in your scenario) you can refer to this value in other tables. Since it's unique, I can look at a column with that unique ID in another table (say HelloCity) and instantly know where to look in the User table to get more information about the person that column refers to.
For example, HelloCity only stores the IDs for the User and City. Why? Because it'd be silly to re-record ALL the data about the City and ALL the data about the User in another table when you already have it stored elsewhere. The beauty of it is, say the user needs to update their DisplayName for some reason. To do so, you just need to change it in User. Now, any row that refers to the user instantly returns the new DisplayName; otherwise you would have to find every record using the old DisplayName and update it accordingly, which in larger databases could take a considerable amount of time.
Note that the primary key is only unique in that specific table though - you could theoretically see the same primary key value in your City and User tables (this is especially common if you're using simple integers as IDs) but your database will know the difference based on the relationship you build between tables as well as your JOIN statements in your queries.
Another way primary keys help is they automatically have an index generated on their column(s). This increases performance in queries where your WHERE clause searches on the primary key column value. And, since you'll likely be referring to that primary key in other tables, it makes that lookup faster as well.
In your data model I see some columns that already have 'Id' in them. Without knowing your dataset I would hope those already have all-unique values so it should be fine to place a PK on those. If you get errors doing that there are likely duplicates.
Back to your question about HelloCity - Entity Framework is a little finicky when it comes to keys. If you really want to play it safe you can auto-generate a unique ID for every entry and call it good. This makes sense because it's a many-to-many relationship, meaning that any combination can appear any number of times, so in theory there's no reliable way to distinguish between unique entries. In the event you want to drop a single entry in the future, how would you know what row to refer to? You could make the argument that you search on all the fields and the greeting may be different, but if there are multiple visits to a city with the same greeting, you may accidentally drop all of those records instead of just one.
However, if it was a one-to-one relationship you could get away with making the combination of both CityId and UserId the primary key since that combination should always be unique (because you should never see multiple rows making that same combination).
Late to the party but I wanted to add there are special cases where a table does not need to have a primary key, or any type of key.
Take the case of a singleton, for example. A table that includes a single row (or a very well known number of rows) always. The dual table in Oracle is one case.
Formally, the primary key for a singleton is (): that is, a key with no columns. I'm not aware of any database that allows it, though.
There are other cases where a PK is not needed, typically with log tables that usually are "end tables" since you typically draw them at the border of your diagram; no other tables refer to them (i.e. they have no children). A good use of indexes is enough to deal with them since, by their nature, they don't need to enforce row uniqueness.
But, to close, yes 99.99% of tables in a relational database should have a PK.
Related
I wondered if I insert, let's say, 10 entries into a SQL Server table.
If i then delete one of them, will the id/index change correspondingly?
Example:
1 | Simon Cowell | 56 years
2 | Frank Lampard| 24 years
3 | Harry Bennet | 12 years
If I delete #2, will Harry Bennet's index change to 2?
Thanks :)
EDIT:
Sorry for my outrage, had a bad day. And yes, I should have researched it myself, I deserve to be downvoted.
I don't ask for anything, I just want to say that I'm sorry :|
Since you seem to be conflating "id/index" let's talk a little but about the primary key and indexes in the context of a relational database.
The "id" or primary key assigned to a row in a SQL database is the unique identifier for that row. It can consist of one or more columns. (When more than one column is involved it is known as a "composite" or "multi-part" key.) The primary key should really do nothing more than be a unique handle for addressing a row: the primary key should not contain any information about the entity represented by the row, especially if that info has the potential to be mutable; an example would be a part number that has a suffix that stands for the type of metal the part is made from; if that metal can possibly change from titanium to unobtainium, say, that part number would make a bad choice as a primary key; it would be better to have another column to store the type of metal than to make the metal-type suffix part of the primary key. "Meaningful" primary keys might have made some sense in legacy non-relational databases but in a relational database they are to be avoided.
When seeking to enforce the uniqueness of a primary key, a database engine can make use of an index so it can rapidly test whether the key value exists. It could use a binary algorithm to find the value, avoiding the need to scan the actual data "brute force", row by row, looking for the value. But the index that is used behind the scenes by the engine to assist it with the primary key housekeeping is not the same as the primary key itself.
If you have a simple sequential integer as your primary key, there's an infinite number of them, so there is no need to reuse an integer when it becomes available when the row to which it was assigned has been deleted. So the relational database engine won't automatically attempt to reuse it, and it won't by any means change the primary key values that have been assigned to all other rows in the table when "gaps" in the number sequence are created by a deletion. Many other rows in other tables could be referencing those values and having them be mutable would create either chaos or a huge inefficiency.
Hashing algorithms are another very efficient way a database engine can quickly test for the existence of a key value. It computes the location in the hashed-file where the key would be if it did exist, and then looks there for it. The rows are stored in no particular order, so such schemes are optimized for instant finding of records in a large table, not for culling records that have a common characteristic, such as all customers in zipcode 10023.
No. You can set up triggers or logic to do it if you want; however, it will not automatically do this.
No it will not change automatically
No, it wont. And hopefully, that's the answer you're hoping for. For any auto-generated identifiers (such as IDENTITY columns), you should, so far as possible, ignore the data type and treat it as an opaque "blob" of identity information.
It gets assigned during insert, and you can use it for cross-referencing purposes, but the fact that it's numeric is not something you should use or rely upon. It's just a stable identifier for the row.
Traditionally I have always used an ID column in SQL (mostly mysql and postgresql).
However I am wondering if it is really necessary if the rest of the columns in each row make in unique. In my latest project I have the "ID" column set as my primary key, however I never call it or use it in any way, as the data in the row makes it unique and is much more useful for me.
So, if every row in a SQL table is unique, does it need a primary key ID table, and are there ant performance changes with or without one?
Thanks!
EDIT/Additional info:
The specific example that made me ask this question is a table I am using for a many-to-many-to-many-to-many table (if we still call it that at that point) it has 4 columns (plus ID) each of which represents an ID of an external table, and each row will always be numeric and unique. only one of the columns is allowed to be null.
I understand that for normal tables an ID primary key column is a VERY good thing to have. But I get the feeling on this particular table it just wastes space and slows down adding new rows.
If you really do have some pre-existing column in your data set that already does uniquely identify your row - then no, there's no need for an extra ID column. The primary key however must be unique (in ALL circumstances) and cannot be empty (must be NOT NULL).
In my 20+ years of experience in database design, however, this is almost never truly the case. Most "natural" ID's that appear to be unique aren't - ultimately. US Social Security Numbers aren't guaranteed to be unique, and most other "natural" keys end up being almost unique - and that's just not good enough for a database system.
So if you really do have a proper, unique key in your data already - use it! But most of the time, it's easier and more convenient to have just a single surrogate ID that you can guarantee will be unique over all rows.
Don't confuse the logical model with the implementation.
The logical model shows a candidate key (all columns) which could makes your primary key.
Great. However...
In practice, having a multi column primary key has downsides: it's wide, not good when clustered etc. There is plenty of information out there and in the "related" questions list on the right
So, you'd typically
add a surrogate key (ID column)
add a unique constraint to keep the other columns unique
the ID column will be the clustered key (can be only one per table)
You can make either key the primary key now
The main exception is link or many-to-many tables that link 2 ID columns: a surrogate isn't needed (unless you have a braindead ORM)
Edit, a link: "What should I choose for my primary key?"
Edit2
For many-many tables: SQL: Do you need an auto-incremental primary key for Many-Many tables?
Yes, you could have many attributes (values) in a record (row) that you could use to make a record unique. This would be called a composite primary key.
However it will be much slower in general because the construction of the primary index will be much more expensive. The primary index is used by relational database management systems (RDBMS) not only to determine uniqueness, but also in how they order and structure records on disk.
A simple primary key of one incrementing value is generally the most performant and the easiest solution for the RDBMS to manage.
You should have one column in every table that is unique.
EDITED...
This is one of the fundamentals of database table design. It's the row identifier - the identifier identifies which row(s) are being acted upon (updated/deleted etc). Relying on column combinations that are "unique", eg (first_name, last_name, city), as your key can quickly lead to problems when two John Smiths exist, or worse when John Smith moves city and you get a collision.
In most cases, it's best to use a an artificial key that's guaranteed to be unique - like an auto increment integer. That's why they are so popular - they're needed. Commonly, the key column is simply called id, or sometimes <tablename>_id. (I prefer id)
If natural data is available that is unique and present for every row (perhaps retinal scan data for people), you can use that, but all-to-often, such data isn't available for every row.
Ideally, you should have only one unique column. That is, there should only be one key.
Using IDs to key tables means you can change the content as needed without having to repoint things
Ex. if every row points to a unique user, what would happen if he/she changed his name to let say John Blblblbe which had already been in db? And then again, what would happen if you software wants to pick up John Blblblbe's details, whose details would be picked up? the old John's or the one ho has changed his name? Well if answer for bot questions is 'nothing special gonna happen' then, yep, you don't really need "ID" column :]
Important:
Also, having a numeric ID column with numbers is much more faster when you're looking for an exact row even when the table hasn't got any indexing keys or have more than one unique
If you are sure that any other column is going to have unique data for every row and isn't going to have NULL at any time then there is no need of separate ID column to distinguish each row from others, you can make that existing column primary key for your table.
No, single-attribute keys are not essential and nor are surrogate keys. Keys should have as many attributes as are necessary for data integrity: to ensure that uniqueness is maintained, to represent accurately the universe of discourse and to allow users to identify the data of interest to them. If you have already identified a suitable key and if you don't find any real need to create another one then it would make no sense to add redundant attributes and indexes to your table.
An ID can be more meaningful, for an example an employee id can represent from which department he is, year of he join and so on. Apart from that RDBMS supports lots operations with ID's.
I am working on the design of a database that will be used to store data that originates from a number of different sources. The instances I am storing are assigned unique IDs by the original sources. Each instance I store should contain information about the source it came from, along with the ID it was associated by this source.
As an example, consider the following table that illustrates the problem:
----------------------------------------------------------------
| source_id | id_on_source | data |
----------------------------------------------------------------
| 1 | 17600 | ... |
| 1 | 17601 | ... |
| 2 | 1 | ... |
| 3 | 1 | ... |
----------------------------------------------------------------
Note that while the id_on_source is unique for each source, it is possible for the same id_on_source to be found for different sources.
I have a decent understanding of relational databases, but am far from an expert or even an experienced user. The problem I face with this design is what I should use as primary key. The data seems to dictate the use of a composite primary key of (source_id, id_on_source). After a little googling I found some heated debates on the pros and cons of composite primary keys however, leaving me a little confused.
The table will have one-to-many relationship with other tables, and will thus be referred to in the foreign keys of other tables.
I am not tied to a specific RDBMS and I am not sure if it matters for the sake of the argument, but let's say that I prefer to work with SQLite and MySQL.
What are the pros and cons of using a composite foreign key in this case? Which would you prefer?
I personally find composite primary keys to be painful. For every table that you wish to join to your "sources" table you will need to add both the source_id and id_on_source field.
I would create a standard auto-incrementing primary key on your sources table and add a unique index on source_id and id_on_source columns.
This then allows you to add just the id of the sources table as a foreign key on other tables.
Generally I have also found support for composite primary keys within many frameworks and tooling products to be "patchy" at best and non-existent in others
Composite keys are tough to manage and slow to join. Since you're building a summary table, use a surrogate key (i.e.-an autoincrement/identity column). Leave your natural key columns there.
This has a lot of other benefits, too. Primarily, if you merge with a company and they have one of the same sources, but reused keys, you're going to get into trouble if you aren't using a surrogate key.
This is the widely acknowledged best practice in data warehousing (a much larger undertaking than what you're doing, but still relevant), and for good reason. Surrogates provide data integrity and quick joins. You can get burned very quickly with natural keys, so stay away from them as an identifier, and only use them on the import process.
You have a business requirement that the combination of those two attributes are unique. So, you should have a UNIQUE constraint on those two attributes. Whether you call that UNIQUE constraint "primary" is really just a preference, it doesn't have much impact aside from documentation.
The only question is whether you then add an extra column and mark it UNIQUE. The only reason I can see to do that is performance, which is a legitimate reason.
Personally, I don't like the approach of turning every database into essentially a graph, where the generated columns are essentially pointers and you are just traversing from one to the next. I think that throws away all of the greatness of a relational system. If you step back and think about it, you're introducing a bunch of columns that have no meaning to your business, at all. You may be interested in my related blog post.
I believe that composite keys create a very natural and descriptive data model. My experience comes from Oracle and I don't think there is any technical issues when creating a composite PK. In fact anyone analysing the data dictionary would immediately understand something about the table. In your case it would be obvious that each source_id must have unique id_on_source.
The use of natural keys often creates a hot debate, but people whom I work with like natural keys from a good data model perspective.
Pretty much the only time I use a composite primary key is when the high-order part of the key is the key to another table. For example, I might create an OrderLineItem table with a primary key of OrderId + LineNumber. As many accesses against the OrderLineItem table will be "order join orderlineitem using (orderid)" or some variation of that, this is often handy. It also makes it easy when looking at database dumps to figure out what line items are connected to what order.
As others have noted, composite keys are a pain in most other circumstances because your joins have to involve all the pieces. It's more to type which means more potential for mistakes, queries are slower, etc.
Two-part keys aren't bad; I do those fairly often. I'm reluctant to use a three-part key. More than three-parts, I'd say forget it.
In your example, I suspect there's little to be gained by using the composite key. Just invent a new sequence number and let the source and source key be ordinary attributes.
I ran into problems using a lot of composite keys and so I wouldn't recommend it (more below), I've also found there to be benefits in an independent/surrogate key (rather than natural) when trying to roll back user mistakes.
The problem was that via a set of relations, one table joined two tables where for each row part of the composite was the same (this was appropriate in 3rd normal form - a comparison between two parts of a parent). I de-duplicated that part of the composite relationship in the join table (so instead of parent1ID, other1ID, parent2ID, other2ID there was parentID, other1ID, other2ID) but now the relation couldn't update changes to the primary key, because it tried to do it twice via each route and failed in the middle.
Some people recommend you use a Globally Unique ID (GUID): merge replication and transactional replication with updating subscriptions use uniqueidentifier columns to guarantee that rows are uniquely identified across multiple copies of the table. If the value if globally unique when it's created, then you don't need to add the source_id to make it unique.
Although a uniqueid is a good primary key, I agree that it's usually better to use a different, natural (not necessarily unique) key as your clustered index. For example if a uniqueid is the PK which identifies employees, you might want to clustered index to be the department (if your select statements usually retrieve all employees within a given department). If you do want to use a unqiqueid as the clustered index, see the NEWSEQUENTIALID() function: this creates sequential uniqueid values, which (being sequential) have better clustering performance.
Adding an extra ID column will leave you having to enforce TWO uniqueness constraints instead of one.
Using that extra ID column as the foreign key in other referencing tables, instead of the key that presents itself naturally, will cause you to have to do MORE joins, namely in all the cases where you need the original soruce_ID plus ID_on_source along with data from the referencing table.
I'm defining a database for a customer/ order system where there are two highly distinct types of customers. Because they are so different having a single customer table would be very ugly (it'd be full of null columns as they are pointless for one type).
Their orders though are in the same format. Is it possible to have a CustomerId column in my Order table which has a foreign key to both the Customer Types? I have set it up in SQL server and it's given me no problems creating the relationships, but I'm yet to try inserting any data.
Also, I'm planning on using nHibernate as the ORM, could there be any problems introduced by doing the relationships like this?
No, you can't have a single field as a foreign key to two different tables. How would you tell where to look for the key?
You would at least need a field that tells what kind of user it is, or two separate foreign keys.
You could also put the information that is common for all users in one table and have separate tables for the information that is specific for the user types, so that you have a single table with user id as primary key.
A foreign key can only reference a single primary key, so no. However, you could use a bridge table:
CustomerA <---- CustomerA_Orders ----> Order
CustomerB <---- CustomerB_Orders ----> Order
So Order doesn't even have a foreign key; whether this is desirable, though...
I inherited a SQL Server database where this was done (a single column used in four foreign key relationships with four unrelated tables), so yes, it's possible. My predecessor is gone, though, so I can't ask why he thought it was a good idea.
He used a GUID column ("uniqueidentifier" type) to avoid the ambiguity problem, and he turned off constraint checking on the foreign keys, since it's guaranteed that only one will match. But I can think of lots of reasons that you shouldn't, and I haven't thought of any reasons you should.
Yours does sound like the classical "specialization" problem, typically solved by creating a parent table with the shared customer data, then two child tables that contain the data unique to each class of customer. Your foreign key would then be against the parent customer table, and your determination of which type of customer would be based on which child table had a matching entry.
You can create a foreign key referencing multiple tables. This feature is to allow vertical partioining of your table and still maintain referential integrity. In your case however, this is not applicable.
Your best bet would be to have a CustomerType table with possible columns - CustomerTypeID, CustomerID, where CustomerID is the PK and then refernce your OrderID table to CustomerID.
Raj
I know this is a very old question; however if other people are finding this question through the googles, and you don't mind adding some columns to your table, a technique I've used (using the original question as a hypothetical problem to solve) is:
Add a [CustomerType] column. The purpose of storing a value here is to indicate which table holds the PK for your (assumed) [CustomerId] FK column. Optional - addition of a check constraint (to ensure CustomerType is in CustomerA or CustomerB) will help you sleep better at night.
Add a computed column for each [CustomerType], eg:
[CustomerTypeAId] as case when [CustomerType] = 'CustomerA' then [CustomerId] end persisted
[CustomerTypeBId] as case when [CustomerType] = 'CustomerB' then [CustomerId] end persisted
Add your foreign keys to the calculated (and persisted) columns.
Caveat: I'm primarily in a MSSQL environment; so I don't know how well this translates to other DBMS (ie: Postgres, ORACLE, etc).
As noted, if the key is, say, 12345, how would you know which table to look it up in? You could, I suppose, do something to insure that the key values for the two tables never overlapped, but this is too ugly and painful to contemplate. You could have a second field that says which customer type it is. But if you're going to have two fields, why not have one field for customer type 1 id and another for customer type 2 id.
Without knowing more about your app, my first thought is that you really should have a general customer table with the data that is common to both, and then have two additional tables with the data specific to each customer type. I would think that there must be a lot of data common to the two -- basic stuff like name and address and customer number at the least -- and repeating columns across tables sucks big time. The additional tables could then refer back to the base table. As there is then a single key for the base table, the issue of foreign keys having to know which table to refer to evaporates.
Two distinct types of customer is a classic case of types and subtypes or, if you prefer, classes and subclasses. Here is an answer from another question.
Essentially, the class-table-inheritance technique is like Arnand's answer. The use of the shared-primary-key technique is what allows you to get around the problems created by two types of foreign key in one column. The foreign key will be customer-id. That will identify one row in the customer table, and also one row in the appropriate kind of customer type table, as the case may be.
Create a "customer" table include all the columns that have same data for both types of customer.
Than create table "customer_a" and "customer_b"
Use "customer_id" from "consumer" table as foreign key in "customer_a" and "customer_b"
customer
|
---------------------------------
| |
cusomter_a customer_b
Just a quick database design question: Do you ALWAYS use an ID field in EVERY table, or just most of them? Clearly most of your tables will benefit, but are there ever tables that you might not want to use an ID field?
For example, I want to add the ability to add tags to objects in another table (foo). So I've got a table FooTag with a varchar field to hold the tag, and a fooID field to refer to the row in foo. Do I really need to create a clustered index around an essentially arbitrary ID field? Wouldn't it be more efficient to use fooID and my text field as the clustered index, since I will almost always be searching by fooID anyway? Plus using my text in the clustered index would keep the data sorted, making sorting easier when I have to query my data. The downside is that inserts would take longer, but wouldn't that be offset by the gains during selection, which would happen far more often?
What are your thoughts on ID fields? Bendable rule, or unbreakable law?
edit: I am aware that the example provided is not normalized. If tagging is to be a major part of the project, with multiple tables being tagged, and other 'extras', a two-table solution would be a clear answer. However in this simplest case, would normalization be worthwhile? It would save some space, but require an extra join when running queries
As in much of programming: rule, not law.
Proof by exception: Some two-column tables exist only to form relationships between other more meaningful tables.
If you are making tables that bridge between two or more other tables and the only fields you need are the dual PK/FK's, then I don't know why you would need ID column in there as well.
ID columns generally can be very helpful, but that doesn't mean you should go peppering them in at every occasion.
As others have said, it's a general, rather than absolute, rule and there are plenty of exceptions (tables with composite keys for example).
There are some occasional but useful occasions where you might want to create an artificial ID in a table that already has a (usually composite) unique identifier. For example, in one system I've created a table to store part numbers; although the part numbers are unique, they may actually change - we add an arbitrary integer PartID. Not so common, but it's a typical real-world example.
In general what you really want is to be able if at all possible to have some kind of way to uniquely identify a record. It could be an id field or it could be a unique index (which does not have to be on just one field). Anytime I thought I could get away without creating a way to uniquely identify a record, I have been proven wrong. All tables do not have a natural key though and if they do not, you really need to have an id file of some kind. If you have a natural key, you could use that instead, but I find that even then I need an id field in most cases to prevent having to do too much updating when the natural key changes (it always seems to change). Plus having worked with literally hundreds of databases concerning many many differnt topics, I can tell you that a true natural key is rare. As others have nmentioned there is no need for an id field in a table that is simply there to join two tables that havea many to many relationship, but even this should have a unique index.
If you need to retrieve records from that table with unique id then yes. If you will retrieve them by some other composite key made up of foreign keys then no. The last thing you need is fields, data, and indexes that you do not use.
A clustered index does not need to be on primary key or a surrogate (identity column) either.
Your design, however, is not normalized. Typically for tagging, I use two tables, a table of tags (with a surrogate key) and a table of links from the tags to the subject table(s) using the surrogate key in the tag table and theprimary key in the subject table. This allows your tags to apply to different entities (photos, articles, employees, locations, products, whatever). It allows you to enforce foreign key relationships to multiple tables, and also allows you to invent tag hierarchies and other things about the tag table.
As far as the indexes on this design, it will be dictated by the usage patterns.
In general developers love having an ID field on all tables except for 'linking' tables because it makes development much easier, and I am no exception to this. DBA's on the other hand see no problem with making natural primary keys made up of 3 or 4 columns. It can be a butting of heads to try and get a good database design.