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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 ...
For referential integrity to hold in a relational database, any column in a base table that is declared a foreign key can only contain either null values or values from a parent table's primary key or a candidate key. [2] In other words, when a foreign key value is used it must reference a valid, existing primary key in the parent table. For ...
The same format applies to the foreign key (abbreviated FK) because each FK matches a preexistent PK. Each of attributes being part of a PK (or of a FK) must have data values (such as numbers, letters or typographic symbols) but not data marks (also known as NULL marks in SQL world).
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.
E. F. Codd mentioned nulls as a method of representing missing data in the relational model in a 1975 paper in the FDT Bulletin of ACM-SIGMOD.Codd's paper that is most commonly cited with the semantics of Null (as adopted in SQL) is his 1979 paper in the ACM Transactions on Database Systems, in which he also introduced his Relational Model/Tasmania, although much of the other proposals from ...
The fact table also contains foreign keys from the dimension tables, where time series (e.g. dates) and other dimensions (e.g. store location, salesperson, product) are stored. All foreign keys between fact and dimension tables should be surrogate keys, not reused keys from operational data.
The values of generated surrogate keys have no relationship to the real-world meaning of the data held in a row. When inspecting a row holding a foreign key reference to another table using a surrogate key, the meaning of the surrogate key's row cannot be discerned from the key itself. Every foreign key must be joined to see the related data item.
Foreign keys are integrity constraints enforcing that the value of the attribute set is drawn from a candidate key in another relation. For example, in the Order relation the attribute Customer ID is a foreign key. A join is the operation that draws on information from several relations at once.