The irony is that they're still using parent IDs in their data. Instead of storing it in a dedicated column with an optimized data type, it's being prepended to

The irony is that they're still using parent IDs in their data. Instead of storing it in a dedicated column with an optimized data type, it's being prepended to the data string. It might not be a number, and it might not be in an ID column, but it remains an identifier that points to another (expected) value. The change of format doesn't disqualify it from being a parent ID.