Ship of Theseus is the thing I was looking for. Our dept has repeatedly suffered from this same mistake. Our team was stuck with this damn three-part PK that al

Ship of Theseus is the thing I was looking for. Our dept has repeatedly suffered from this same mistake. Our team was stuck with this damn three-part PK that also gets exposed to partner teams using our service as an identifier, and is now baked into their code and their clients' code. Now we took it out as the PK, but it's still used as an identifier. We're making a bunch of hacks to ensure that ID stays unique. The analogy went further when the partner team asked, can we have a "stable ID" that doesn't change even if that identifier changes. Our team was close to exposing our new row-level keys again. I asked, if the name changes, is it the same thing still? What if the name and the other attributes change? This isn't like a social media post that obviously has an identifier; we're modeling physical objects. Why do you need this feature again? Turns out they didn't need the feature, or even quite understand what they were asking. The way our application is, really we didn't have to expose any identifier with guarantees about uniqueness.