A few untruths I’ve learnt having worked for a few global clients over the years about identifiers and how they operate in the real world.
- There is one source of truth
- Everything has a globally unique ID
- Every thing has a single ID
- Things never swap IDs
- IDs never change
- IDs only change rarely
- IDs change predictably
- The old IDs aren’t needed anymore
- Every ID is in the same format
- An ID is always numeric or ASCII
- Case does not matter in IDs
- Case does matter in IDs
- A column will never contain more than one format
- The latest Excel is the most correct
- You can manage all of this with code