About primary key in the table?

Question

I would like to have some explaination about the characteristics of a primary key in the table of such database.This is for vb 2008 express edition,since im new to this language,if this is true, as far as i understand about the characteristic in setting the primary key on each field for true.My question is if you are doing an updates/edit records in your table using the DataContext,if you setup the primary key for true of one of your field in the table it would edit all records in one datarow but if you put the primary key for true in all fields except one of them,all the records in the data column of that field which primary key is false could be edited.Basically its impossible to edit all records in the datarow and all the records in the datacolumn of the table in such one event.

Is there any further explaination about the characteristics of primary key in the table?

Answer 1

The purpose of the primary key in a database table is to identify the field (or fields) that make up a value that uniquely identifies each record on the table. A typical examples are CustomerID in a Customer table; each customer is given a unique ID, and this ID can be used to link the customer into other tables (such as an order table).

Sometimes there are tables where not one single field will contain a unique value for each record. In such cases more than one field can be set as the primary key. In those cases, the combination of values in the primary key fields should always be unique.

So, on the database level, this is not related to the possibility to edit the field or not.

Of course, wikipedia has some content on the subject.