A composite key is a combination of multiple SSA-NAME3 fields. For example, to search for a person, such as John Doe, who resides at a specific address, you can create a composite key by combining the Person_Name and Address_Part1 fields. This approach returns only the records of John Doe that match the composite key, instead of records that pertain to any John Doe.

When you use the

ssan3_get_keys

or

ssan3_get_ranges

calls to build keys and ranges, you can specify multiple fields. SSA-NAME3 concatenates the key for each field and builds a composite key instead of using multiple keys.