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

First, I would agree with everything Mr. Guerreiro said . . . . BUT . . .

If you are looking at this purely from a DBA viewpoint, I'd say it is ultimately an application problem. We (DBAs) can offer the power of the database, and encourage application developers to use that power, but ultimately it's up to them. The DBA only maintains the buckets -- the applications people are responsible for what they put in those buckets.

Opinions are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.

In article <369AC877.568BEC27_at_worldnet.att.net>,   jabuhl_at_worldnet.att.net wrote:
> 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
>
>

Ed Stevens
Nissan Motor Mfg. Corp., USA

-----------== Posted via Deja News, The Discussion Network ==---------- http://www.dejanews.com/ Search, Read, Discuss, or Start Your Own Received on Wed Jan 13 1999 - 08:24:46 CST