Let's say we create a table called books, with id, name and price as columns, and insert a few records in it.
Notice that there are two books with the name Basics of SQL with the exact same price. And it is a perfectly possible scenario. There might be some data about these two books which is different from the other, but we don't have that information. To the database, these are two separate books.
In that case, how do we identify the uniqueness of a book? One of the possible answers here is, their id. Yes, but how do we make sure that it is enforced in the structure of the table?
An answer could be using the UNIQUE constraint. But, there is a fine difference between what UNIQUE does, and the problem we are trying to solve here. A UNIQUE constraint simply makes sure that values in different rows, under the same column, marked unique, remain unique. There can be multiple UNIQUE columns in a table. But they can't identify an individual row of records in isolation with others.
SQL provides a concept called PRIMARY KEY, to solve the problem of individual identification of records. Have a look at the CREATE TABLE statement below:
At its most basic level, a PRIMARY KEY is a column in the table that has the ability to uniquely identify a row of records. So, in its basic version, one can simply declare a column as PRIMARY KEY by mentioning it next to the column name and data type.