Question

fill in the blank 4 points tony is a hospital database administrator who stores patient information in the database. the database table includes the columns patientid, firstname, lastname, dateofbirth, and phonenumber. the patientid column is designated as the answer key, which means that if this column were allowed to contain null values, it would fail in its functionality because it would not guarantee uniqueness for each record. candidate foreign primary

Explanation:

To solve this, we analyze the context of database keys:

• A "candidate key" is a column (or set of columns) that can uniquely identify a record. But the description here is about a key that, if allowed nulls, fails in functionality (uniqueness).
• A "foreign key" is used to link two tables, not for uniqueness of a single table's records.
• A "primary key" is a column (or set) that uniquely identifies each record in a table and cannot have null values (since null would break uniqueness). The description says if this column (PatientID) had nulls, it would fail in functionality (uniqueness), which matches the properties of a primary key (as primary keys require uniqueness and non - null values). So the correct term is "primary".

Answer:

primary