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A foreign key is a set of attributes in a table that refers to the primary key of another table, linking these two tables. In the context of relational databases, a foreign key is subject to an inclusion dependency constraint that the tuples consisting of the foreign key attributes in one relation, R, must also exist in some other (not necessarily distinct) relation, S; furthermore that those ...
The use of efficient indexes on both primary and foreign keys can dramatically improve query performance. This is because B-tree indexes result in query times proportional to log(n) where n is the number of rows in a table and hash indexes result in constant time queries (no size dependency as long as the relevant part of the index fits into ...
An example of a database that has not enforced referential integrity. In this example, there is a foreign key (artist_id) value in the album table that references a non-existent artist — in other words there is a foreign key value with no corresponding primary key value in the referenced table.
Database designers that use a surrogate key as the primary key for every table will run into the occasional scenario where they need to automatically retrieve the database-generated primary key from an SQL INSERT statement for use in other SQL statements. Most systems do not allow SQL INSERT statements to return row data. Therefore, it becomes ...
SQL statements are used to perform tasks such as insert data to a database, delete or update data in a database, or retrieve data from a database. Though database systems use SQL, they also have their own additional proprietary extensions that are usually only used on their system.
In particular, the natural join allows the combination of relations that are associated by a foreign key. For example, in the above example a foreign key probably holds from Employee.DeptName to Dept.DeptName and then the natural join of Employee and Dept combines all employees with their departments. This works because the foreign key holds ...
Surrogate keys simplify the creation of foreign key relationships because they only require a single column (as opposed to composite keys - which require multiple columns). When creating a query on the database, forgetting to include all the columns in a composite foreign key when joining tables can lead to unexpected results in the form of an ...
In SQL:1999 a recursive (CTE) query may appear anywhere a query is allowed. It's possible, for example, to name the result using CREATE [ RECURSIVE ] VIEW . [ 16 ] Using a CTE inside an INSERT INTO , one can populate a table with data generated from a recursive query; random data generation is possible using this technique without using any ...