True that referential integrity is best. But you could cause problems for
the application by adding it. (You probably already realized that
already -- the horror.) I would just come up with scripts to show child
records without a parent and hand them over to the developers -- daily.
:-)
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 Fri Jan 15 1999 - 00:06:21 CST
