". They gave all of their devices serial numbers, that's great, but they all got the same serial number"
Yes, there are functioning adults that work in technology that don't understand the concept of a serial number
Source: was very glad of not making 'serial number' of a certain product in a database the primary key, when repeated serial numbers started to arrive (it was not our responsibility to generate those numbers)
ISTM that primary keys should be completely internal to the DB. You can always add another column with a unique index, if someone lies to you that any particular datum is unique. Then when dupes roll in like they usually do, you can just drop the index.
A great frustration of mine in a previous job was that a predecessor had informed the accounting department of internal keys used for a many-to-many relation in the configuration of a process that journalled transactions from the billing system to the accounting system. That meant I could never reconfigure the janky-ass, inefficient way that journaling was set up, because the accountants knew how it should be.
Yes, there are functioning adults that work in technology that don't understand the concept of a serial number
Source: was very glad of not making 'serial number' of a certain product in a database the primary key, when repeated serial numbers started to arrive (it was not our responsibility to generate those numbers)