Re: Declaring Unenforced Constraints

Laconic2 wrote:
> There's a feature I would like to see in today's RDBMSes. It's the ability
> to declare a constraint to be true, but to tell the DBMS not to bother
> enforcing it. I'm talking here about SQLRDBMSes, and probably TRDBMSes as
> well.

SQL Server has this as well, at least for foreign keys.

It can be useful if you're loading in a massive amount of data from an online system to a reporting system and you don't want to worry about having to load the tables in a specific order or to have the whole thing crash at the start due to a small broken key constraint.

Once the data's in you can enable the constraints and make sure the data is all valid. If it's not, you've got the data at hand to investigate the problem easily.

Paul. Received on Fri Nov 05 2004 - 20:21:19 CET