title: Should the contents of a column acting as a primary key be interpretable or purely unique integers
body: <p>I have the luxury of designing a database from scratch. When designing columns to act as unique keys should I just use unique integers or should I attempt to make the values interpretable. So if I had a lookup table of ward names in a hospital should the id column contain unique codes that in someway relate to the name of the ward or just unique integers?</p>