Picking the best primary key + numbering system

Question

We are trying to come up with a numbering system for the asset system that we are creating, there has been a few heated discussions on this topic in the office so I decided

Answer 1

As mentioned before, keep your internal primary keys as just keys, whatever the most optimal datatype is on your platform.

However you do need to let the numbering system argument be fought out, as this is actually a business requirement, and perhaps let's call it an identification system for the asset.

If there is only going to be one identifier, then add it as a column to the main table. If there are likely to be many identification systems (and assets usually have many), you'll need two more tables

    Identifier-type table             Identifier-cross-ref table
      type-id             ------------> type-id              (unique
      type-name                         identifier-string     key)
                                        internal-id

That way different people who need to access the asset can identify in their own way. For example the server team will identify a server differently from the network team and different again from project management, accounts, etc.

Plus, you get to go to all the meetings where everyone argues with each other.