title: Is using Personally Identifiable Information (PII) as foreign keys discouraged in database design?
body: <p>While clensing <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personally_identifiable_information" rel="nofollow noreferrer">PII</a> from test data I have been stuck with a challenging scenario:  cascading the changes through the foreign key relationships in the data.  Given the focus on privacy and regulations should this practice be discouraged?  If the PII itself were not used in any key fashion a neat trick would be to just shuffle the columns.</p>
  
  <p>There are some commercial tools available to address this problem but none of them seem to handle a large variety of databases well.  </p>