Re: RI - pros and cons

From: Sybrand Bakker <postbus_at_sybrandb.demon.nl>
Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 06:54:25 +0100
Message-ID: <s4ti9u8j8sa9ij9dq5v5hv641ctinha7li@4ax.com>

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002 20:52:28 GMT, spamdump_at_nospam.noway.nohow (Ed Stevens) wrote:

>I feel stupid even posting this question but there's trouble brewing in River
>City. I'm getting caught between my "partner" DBA (with whom I have many
>philosophical differences) and the developers.
>
>New application being developed. Four rather simple tables - header data,
>detail data, and a couple of reference/look-up tables. Developers want RI and I
>agree. DBA says "RI is more trouble than its' worth. You should take care of
>it in your application." I'm caught in the middle, stongly disagreeing (that's
>putting it diplomaticly) with the other DBA but having to maintain a working
>relationship. He makes the claim "all the other DBA's I read on MetaLink say RI
>is too much trouble" but won't produce evidence.
>
>Anyone want to comment on the technical merits of RI vs. not. I've always felt
>that the benefits of RI (and normalized tables) was so obvious as to not even
>require any further justification. Do I need to be re-educated, or . . . .
>

hire a new DBA

Regrettably there are too many commercial sw packages on the market which do not implement RI at the database side. The disadvantages of implementing RI elsewhere are obvious

- it results in fat clients
- it results in non-centralized maintenance of RI code
- it results in much slower RI-checking, as the RI-checking in the

kernel usually doesn't use explicit sql-statements - it may result in locking issues
etc etc etc

Regards

Sybrand Bakker, Senior Oracle DBA

To reply remove -verwijderdit from my e-mail address Received on Wed Mar 20 2002 - 23:54:25 CST