The..Horror.....The..Horror.

Hello,

I just took a new position at a small company. I was not to disturbed to find out that they do not utilize referential integrity constraints. But to my horror, I found out today that they actually create child records with which there is no parent. Sequence numbers are used exclusively. They create the foriegn key as a sequence number then when they need attributes from the parent they create the parent record.

This violates one of Codds original principals of the relational model. I don't have any experience with this type of activity. I don't know what kind of problems it causes other than having a bunch of orphan records in the table. It seems to me that it is no longer a relational database but a database dump.

Can any of you give me some real world examples of the problems this can cause.

Please copy me at jbuhl_at_commerce.com for your responses.

Thanks

joe Received on Mon Jan 11 1999 - 21:51:20 CST