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Primary keys are defined in the ISO SQL Standard, through the PRIMARY KEY constraint. The syntax to add such a constraint to an existing table is defined in SQL:2003 like this: ALTER TABLE < table identifier > ADD [ CONSTRAINT < constraint identifier > ] PRIMARY KEY ( < column name > [ { , < column name > } ...
One of those keys per table may be designated the primary key; other keys are called alternate keys. Any key may consist of one or more attributes. For example, a Social Security Number might be a single attribute key for an employee; a combination of flight number and date might be a key consisting of two attributes for a scheduled flight.
An identity column differs from a primary key in that its values are managed by the server and usually cannot be modified. In many cases an identity column is used as a primary key; however, this is not always the case. It is a common misconception that an identity column will enforce uniqueness; however, this is not the case. If you want to ...
Entity integrity is concerned with ensuring that each row of a table has a unique and non-null primary key value; this is the same as saying that each row in a table represents a single instance of the entity type modelled by the table.
A table (called the referencing table) can refer to a column (or a group of columns) in another table (the referenced table) by using a foreign key. The referenced column(s) in the referenced table must be under a unique constraint, such as a primary key. Also, self-references are possible (not fully implemented in MS SQL Server though [5]).
The columns in a candidate key are called prime attributes, [3] and a column that does not occur in any candidate key is called a non-prime attribute. Every relation without NULL values will have at least one candidate key: Since there cannot be duplicate rows, the set of all columns is a superkey, and if that isn't minimal, some subset of that ...
Database systems usually implicitly create an index on a set of columns declared PRIMARY KEY, and some are capable of using an already-existing index to police this constraint. Many database systems require that both referencing and referenced sets of columns in a FOREIGN KEY constraint are indexed, thus improving performance of inserts ...
A check constraint is a type of integrity constraint in SQL which specifies a requirement that must be met by each row in a database table. The constraint must be a predicate . It can refer to a single column, or multiple columns of the table.