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In database design, a composite key is a candidate key that consists of two or more attributes, [1] [2] [3] (table columns) that together uniquely identify an entity occurrence (table row). A compound key is a composite key for which each attribute that makes up the key is a foreign key in its own right.
Keys that are within their originating entity are unique within that entity. Keys that migrate to another entity may or may not be unique, depending on the design and how they are used in the other table. Foreign keys may be the primary key in another table; for example a PersonID may become the EmployeeID in the Employee table. In this case ...
Foreign key refers to a field in a relational table that matches the primary key column of another table. It relates the two keys. Foreign keys need not have unique values in the referencing relation. A foreign key can be used to cross-reference tables, and it effectively uses the values of attributes in the referenced relation to restrict the ...
Recall that the Book table below has a composite key of {Title, Format}, which will not satisfy 2NF if some subset of that key is a determinant. At this point in our design the key is not finalised as the primary key, so it is called a candidate key. Consider the following table:
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 ...
A candidate key, or simply a key, of a relational database is any set of columns that have a unique combination of values in each row, with the additional constraint that removing any column could produce duplicate combinations of values. A candidate key is a minimal superkey, [1] i.e., a superkey that doesn't contain a smaller one. Therefore ...
With a surrogate key, only the table that defines the surrogate key must be changed. With natural keys, all tables (and possibly other, related software) that use the natural key will have to change. Some problem domains do not clearly identify a suitable natural key. Surrogate keys avoid choosing a natural key that might be incorrect.
To process this statement without an index the database software must look at the last_name column on every row in the table (this is known as a full table scan). With an index the database simply follows the index data structure (typically a B-tree ) until the Smith entry has been found; this is much less computationally expensive than a full ...