Re: O'Reilly interview with Date

David Cressey wrote:

>
> In this connection, I want to express a contrarian view about "natural
> joins".
> I think making joins "natural" based on common column names is a mistake.
> It's overloading the column name.
> Natural joins sohlud be based on common domain names. Better yet, they
> should be based on declared REFERENCES constraints (perhaps unenforced).

In my own system I never manually code a join, I just specify the two tables and it builds it out of the foreign key definitions.

The foreign key definition has a little more going for it than a REFERENCE constraint, because it actually defines the columns in the child table instead of just referencing existing columns.

-- 
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
(Ken)nneth@(Sec)ure(Dat)a(.com)