Re: The..Horror.....The..Horror.

I'm not sure exactly what you are saying, but I am not sure from your description it is a horror.

Actually, I think traditional referential integrity constraints are a horror, as in, when you try to change the value of the parent key fields, billions of children need to change too, which is difficult to do.

Consequently, many folks use an 'object identifier' (a sequence number) that parents and children can use to establish referential integrity, instead of a real column, and if implemented correctly, that is a good solution.

Steve

Joe & Anne Buhl wrote in message <369AC877.568BEC27_at_worldnet.att.net>...
>Hello,
>
>I just took a new position at a small company. I was not to disturbed
>to find out that they do not utilize referential integrity constraints.
>But to my horror, I found out today that they actually create child
>records with which there is no parent. Sequence numbers are used
>exclusively. They create the foriegn key as a sequence number then when
>they need attributes from the parent they create the parent record.
>
>This violates one of Codds original principals of the relational model.
>I don't have any experience with this type of activity. I don't know
>what kind of problems it causes other than having a bunch of orphan
>records in the table. It seems to me that it is no longer a relational
>database but a database dump.
>
>Can any of you give me some real world examples of the problems this can
>cause.
>
>Please copy me at jbuhl_at_commerce.com for your responses.
>
>Thanks
>
>joe
>
Received on Mon Jan 11 1999 - 22:14:03 CST