1. System-specific technical IDs
Scenario:
A system knows a customer, who is identified via a customer number an additionally via a technical RowId. The enterprise data model (business object model; BOM) has only the customer number as business identifier for the customer. The SOA transformation of the company just begins, so a lot of systems just rely on the RowId.
Question:
Shall a CustomerService deliver the RowId through it's interface for a readCustomer operation?
Asked by: Torsten Winterberg

Answers & thought
1. Arguments for not delivering the rowID
By: Lonneke Dikmans
I don't think you want to communicate techical id's. The problem with technical id's is that it assumes arelationship between systems. It is very well possible that one system uses a journaling structure and creates a new customer id every time something changes or there are multiple tables (there could be a table for propects, customers and other relations). This would mean that we have to store the id of the other systems in every table.
I think it is usually better to have a definition of a customer for communication between systems that contains logical fields, whenever possible. For example the social security number and the date of birth or something.

I know that sometimes this is very difficult. An example is when the customer moves, and you want to identify the moving request. In this case, we define the id as it is stored in the callcenter application. But there is only one place where this data is stored, all other systems are only allowed to store this id as a temporary correlation type of id.