Re: No foreign keys??? What the???

Comments follow:

On 7 Aug 2000 14:22:30 -0500, hause011_at_garnet.tc.umn.edu (Steven Hauser) wrote:

>Sybrand Bakker has the better view on constraints. Yes, enforce many
>constraints consistantly across the system at the database level.
A be all end all solution is usually not the right one. Each case deserver careful inspection and should be treated like a standalone unit.

>
>Most developers have only their single report or application in mind.
>DBAs must take a global view, many reports and programs hit a database,
>and to have all developers enforce a consistent set of constraints in the
>spaghetti they call code is only possible in a few highly organized
>groups.

DBA'a should indeed think of the global view. That is my point exactly. Each app is different, and to have a be all, end all solution is scary in the least.

>
>Most corporations and government development is done in chaos,
>with few groups able to consistantly develop reasonable code.
>To help developers with constraints removes some of the chaos from
>the system.

Government - yes. Coporations - probably. All people have a purpose to serve rin the deign of an application or suite of applications. If everyone does their job, the aforementioned stmt *should* never occur.

>
>Remember, NASA programmers recently crashed a polar lander on Mars because
>a couple developer groups enforced different constraints on the same
>system.

Yes, the extreme. I don't develop for NASA, and I don't think many of us do either. Again, different systems = different solutions.

Brian Kresge Received on Tue Aug 08 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT