Re: The..Horror.....The..Horror.

The artificial key is just fine. I only metioned it for reference. But foriegn key values that reference nothing
is a violation of of rule number 10 (integrity indepedence) of E.F Codds original paper defining what is a relational system.

in regards to your problem with RI constgraints: What happens to your consistency if your updating primary key values. Besides, If it's something that is truly necessary you can disable/drop the constraint make then make the change then renable the constraint. But seems like it would be a special case issue.

Stephen Tenberg wrote:

> I'm not sure exactly what you are saying, but I am not sure from your
> description it is a horror.
>
> Actually, I think traditional referential integrity constraints are a
> horror, as in, when you try to change the value of the parent key fields,
> billions of children need to change too, which is difficult to do.
>
> Consequently, many folks use an 'object identifier' (a sequence number) that
> parents and children can use to establish referential integrity, instead of
> a real column, and if implemented correctly, that is a good solution.
>
> Steve
>
> Joe & Anne Buhl wrote in message <369AC877.568BEC27_at_worldnet.att.net>...
> >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 Tue Jan 12 1999 - 08:24:13 CST