Re: Triggers v Referential keys

On 31 Aug., 14:50, Robert Mullen <rwbmul..._at_hotmail.com> wrote:
> Our company is about to purchase a product based on Oracle 10x. Strange
> thing is, there are no Referential Keys declared at all, only Triggers.
>
> Is this standard procedure in Oracle? Can Referential Keys be totaly
> substituted by Triggers? Would that be wise?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bob

Although it is really alarming situation I won't judge the product only based on that. Quite many financial apps don't have referential integrity, Oracle designer haven't much of it and so on. Although I'm very much pro referential integrity contraints, logic in db and so on, I can assume that there might be possibility to create good apps without them.
So it seems you have access to their source code- you can spot some weak area, so test especially these.
Test many users, test simultaneous work with the same data (same rows selected, same rows updated). Test how it calculates derived data (if such exists), try to load much data and look how performance drops... If you are just users and functionality and performance and provided DATA INTEGRITY after tests satisfies you then lack of RI constraints probably shouldn't be the decisive factor.

Gints Plivna
http://www.gplivna.eu Received on Wed Sep 05 2007 - 03:31:27 CDT