alt Hacker NewsYou have one ID as a primary key. It is used for building relations in your database.
The second ID has nothing to do with internal structure of your data. It is just another field.
You can change your structure however you want (or type of your "internal" IDs) and you don't have to worry about an external consumer. They still get their artificial ID.
So what you meant is not to expose the primary key?
That’s a more reasonable statement but I still don’t agree. This feels like one of those “best practices” that people apply without thinking and create pointless complexity.
Don’t expose your primary key if there is a reason to separate your primary key from the externally-exposed key. If your primary key is the form that you want to expose, then you should just expose the primary key. e.g. If your primary key is a UUID, and you create a separate UUID just to expose publicly, you have most likely added useless complexity to your system.