Re: No foreign keys??? What the???

"Sybrand Bakker" <postbus_at_sybrandb.demon.nl> writes:

> Yes, this is crazy!

You guys have both happily answered a question with far too little information. Too often people are happy to apply the same old stock answers to questions without thinking about if the canned solution is really appropriate to the problem at hand.

In an application with an application layer interface through which all queries proceed most referential integrity constraints are superfluous. In some cases they're still useful as a safeguard against buggy code, however in cases where they are performance critical the extra index lookups would be pointless and costly.

In other cases the integrity constraints are subtle. I find the best way to control data integrity is at the application level where the data representation is actually being manipulated and the more important subtle checks can be performed as assertions within the code. Rather than at the database level where only a crude understanding of the data being represented is available.

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greg