PowerDesigner identifier作用

在使用powerdesigner构建CDM的时候，对于entity的Identifier作用很不是了解，既然有了primary key 为什么还要y有identifier，后面找到一段解释，着实解惑。

原文：

There can be many ways to identify an occurrence of an entity.  For
instance, phone number, SSN, full name, and employee ID all could identify
an employee in an Employee entity.  In the CDM, you could create identifiers
for each of those.  One, and only one, of the identifiers is "promoted" as
the primary identifier of the entity.  Typically, this is chosen as the
smallest and least volatile attribute (or set of attributes) in the entity.
In the example, if employee ID was a system generated numeric value, I would
nominate it as the primary.  The other identifiers become "alternate
identifiers", and are reflected in the diagram as "ai1", "ai2", etc.  Even
though the business may recognize something like "full name" as an
identifier, you may not want to generate that into the database as a unique
constraint, since in reality, two people could actually have the same name.
But, it is useful to understand what the business thinks in the CDM.

大概意思是identifier只是助于理解设计CDM 和表的设计并没有太大关系

另外可以在powerdesigner中关闭identifier的显示 tools>display preference>Entity>  可以选择是否显示Identifier（版本16）