Every system that uses SSN as the primary key is fully testable by itself without third party cooperation. And yet every one of these systems has required worka

Every system that uses SSN as the primary key is fully testable by itself without third party cooperation. And yet every one of these systems has required workarounds because what the designers thought to be invariants, weren't. And this is ALWAYS the case with identifiers that you don't control. You don't make policy decisions about them, but SOMEBODY does. And that somebody isn't aware of - and wouldn't even care - about the invariants that you ASSUMED they followed (and maybe they really did follow them, but they sure don't anymore! Oops...) Fixing broken invariants after the fact is always a nightmare, because it only comes up once you get stuck - either you can't enter something into the database that you absolutely MUST by the weekend, or you can't change something in the database that you absolutely MUST by the weekend. So you do some last minute hacks to get things kind of working, and then it works for awhile until the next problem (usually involving your hack). It's hardly any extra work or complexity to just use an ID generator for the primary key. You'll still have the same indices, the same foreign key linkages etc. You have no reason not to do this. And yet somehow people always seem to fall for the "Oh cool! This existing ID does everything we want! Let's just use that instead of adding one more field to the table! I'm so clever!"