What's a primary key constraint and where does it go?

So, the big company in Indiana that now owns us is having a consulting company install a java portal server. We pay (imnsho) an astounding amount for support and maintenance and the consulting company uses our support contract when they run into problems with the initial build (about 1/2 done at present). Below is a part of the actual thread between consulting company and portal support.

Consultant: The Java process has CPU pegged. Pages are slow to load and occasionally return with an "Internal Server Error"

When we do get an “Internal Server Error”, this shows in the log: ...

I tried rebooting the server, but it spikes again. I also attempted increasing the heap size, but it didn't seem to make a differerence. [SIC]

Can I get help troubleshooting this? Thanks.

Paid Support: Looking at your database, there appear to be two problematic web contents articles, named '500' and '404'. Each has hundreds of coppies [SIC] that all share the same primary key. This is a problem because no web content articles should have the same primary key. Do you know how these web content articles were created?

Ah, the beauty and simplicity of treating a database server as though tables were merely text files and keeping all constraints in client code because you can do that with ORM.

Post #402,166 by mmoffitt 5/29/15 2:46:33 PM Reply	What's a primary key constraint and where does it go? So, the big company in Indiana that now owns us is having a consulting company install a java portal server. We pay (imnsho) an astounding amount for support and maintenance and the consulting company uses our support contract when they run into problems with the initial build (about 1/2 done at present). Below is a part of the actual thread between consulting company and portal support. Consultant: The Java process has CPU pegged. Pages are slow to load and occasionally return with an "Internal Server Error" When we do get an “Internal Server Error”, this shows in the log: ... I tried rebooting the server, but it spikes again. I also attempted increasing the heap size, but it didn't seem to make a differerence. [SIC] Can I get help troubleshooting this? Thanks. Paid Support: Looking at your database, there appear to be two problematic web contents articles, named '500' and '404'. Each has hundreds of coppies [SIC] that all share the same primary key. This is a problem because no web content articles should have the same primary key. Do you know how these web content articles were created? Ah, the beauty and simplicity of treating a database server as though tables were merely text files and keeping all constraints in client code because you can do that with ORM.
Post #402,169 by boxley 5/29/15 3:17:30 PM Reply	tells you what is horked right there problematic web contents articles, named '500' and '404'. Each has hundreds of coppies there should be a redirect to an error message not writing a database entry for every failure. Any opinions expressed by me are mine alone, posted from my home computer, on my own time as a free American and do not reflect the opinions of any person or company that I have had professional relations with in the past 59 years. meep
Post #402,170 by mmoffitt 5/29/15 3:29:42 PM Reply	Not having a PK constraint on that table is just plain dumb. It's either a primary key or it isn't. There's no such thing as a "duplicate primary key."
Post #402,175 by drook 5/29/15 5:01:22 PM Reply	Both There should be a constraint, and whatever horked up process is allowing 404s and 500s shouldn't be writing anything into the table. -- Drew

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