Re: RI - pros and cons

On Fri, 22 Mar 2002, dons_at_bimtech.com.au wrote:
> A major drawback of using RI is that it tends to make your application
> database vendor specific.

How is this? It is completely transparent to the application.

> If you intend building apps that will be used by different brands of
> databases I'd say putting the RI in your app is a good thing.

Once again. How is this?

> Another reason for not using RI is that RI is designed to stop people
> who aren't experts from doing stupid things.

Wrong. It is designed to protect the data. All people of all levels do "stupid" things.

> Quite often there are very good reasons for circumventing RI in the
> application (particularly during data conversion projects or providing
> data importing facilities). For conversions I guess you could just
> drop the constraints, do the conversion and then put them back on.

Yes. This is a reason for disabling them. But you still should reenable them after you are done. Of course, that is a whole other can of worms cause Oracle drops the indexes that are used to support the RI constraints. What are the correct storage clauses of the recreated indexes?

-- 
Galen deForest Boyer
Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.