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

Gee, I've seen this debate before.
Sounds to me like you are a developer.
No way in hell in almost all situations would we allow referential integrity to managed from the application :-0

Greg Stark wrote:

> "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.
>
> --
> greg
Received on Mon Jul 03 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT