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In the relational model of databases, a primary key is a designated attribute that can reliably identify and distinguish between each individual record in a table.The database creator can choose an existing unique attribute or combination of attributes from the table (a natural key) to act as its primary key, or create a new attribute containing a unique ID that exists solely for this purpose ...
The primary keys within a database are used to define the relationships among the tables. When a PK migrates to another table, it becomes a foreign key (FK) in the other table. When each cell can contain only one value and the PK migrates into a regular entity table, this design pattern can represent either a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship.
An INSERT statement can also be used to retrieve data from other tables, modify it if necessary and insert it directly into the table. All this is done in a single SQL statement that does not involve any intermediary processing in the client application. A subselect is used instead of the VALUES clause. The subselect can contain joins, function ...
The syntax of the SQL programming language is defined and maintained by ISO/IEC SC 32 as part of ISO/IEC 9075. This standard is not freely available. This standard is not freely available. Despite the existence of the standard, SQL code is not completely portable among different database systems without adjustments.
Department.DepartmentID is the primary key of the Department table, whereas Employee.DepartmentID is a foreign key. Note that in Employee, "Williams" has not yet been assigned to a department. Also, no employees have been assigned to the "Marketing" department. These are the SQL statements to create the above tables:
Usually one candidate key is chosen to be called the primary key and used in preference over the other candidate keys, which are then called alternate keys. A candidate key is a unique identifier enforcing that no tuple will be duplicated; this would make the relation into something else, namely a bag, by violating the basic definition of a set ...
A requirement of E. F. Codd in his seminal paper is that a primary key of an entity, or any part of it, can never take a null value. [1] The relational model states that every relation (or table ) must have an identifier, called the primary key (abbreviated PK), in such a way that every row of the same relation be identifiable by its content ...
To discover such errors, one must perform a query that uses a left outer join between the table with the foreign key and the table with the primary key, showing both key fields in addition to any fields required to distinguish the record; all invalid foreign-key values will have the primary-key column as NULL. The need to perform such a check ...