Ideas in this flowchart

• Unique identifiers for records
• Each identifier distinguishes one record
• The identifier differs from all other records
• Applications use these identifiers
• Applications retrieve exact records
• Applications create reliable relationships
• Relationships connect stored entities
• Stable IDs prevent ambiguity
• Ambiguity can arise from human-readable values
• Names may be duplicated
• Other human-readable values may be duplicated
• Names may change
• Other human-readable values may change
• Stable IDs remain unaffected by these changes
• Records can therefore be identified reliably