> will absolutely swear that there will never be two people with the same national ID...
I suddenly got flash-backs.
There are duplicate ISBN numbers for books, despite the system being carefully designed to avoid this.
There are ISBN numbers that have invalid checksums, but are valid ISBNs with the invalid number in the barcode and everything. Either the calculation was incorrectly done, or it was simply a mis-print.
The same book can have hundreds of ISBNs.
There is no sane way to determine if two such ISBNs are truly the same (page numbers and everything), or a reprint that has renumbered pages or even subtly different content with corrected typos, missing or added illustrations, etc...
Our federal government publishes a master database of "job id" numbers for each profession one could have. This is critical for legislation related to skilled migrants, collective workplace agreements, etc...
The states decided to add one digit to these numbers to further subdivide them. They did it differently, of course, and some didn't subdivide at all. Some of them have typos with "O" in place of "0" in a few places. Some states dropped the leading zeroes, and then added a suffix digit, which is fun.
On and on and on...
The real world is messy.
Any ID you don't generate yourself is fraught with risk. Even then there are issues such as what happens if the database is rolled back to a backup and then IDs are generated again for the missed data!
I suddenly got flash-backs.
There are duplicate ISBN numbers for books, despite the system being carefully designed to avoid this.
There are ISBN numbers that have invalid checksums, but are valid ISBNs with the invalid number in the barcode and everything. Either the calculation was incorrectly done, or it was simply a mis-print.
The same book can have hundreds of ISBNs.
There is no sane way to determine if two such ISBNs are truly the same (page numbers and everything), or a reprint that has renumbered pages or even subtly different content with corrected typos, missing or added illustrations, etc...
Our federal government publishes a master database of "job id" numbers for each profession one could have. This is critical for legislation related to skilled migrants, collective workplace agreements, etc...
The states decided to add one digit to these numbers to further subdivide them. They did it differently, of course, and some didn't subdivide at all. Some of them have typos with "O" in place of "0" in a few places. Some states dropped the leading zeroes, and then added a suffix digit, which is fun.
On and on and on...
The real world is messy.
Any ID you don't generate yourself is fraught with risk. Even then there are issues such as what happens if the database is rolled back to a backup and then IDs are generated again for the missed data!