Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 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 ...
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 ...
Tables are linked by "key fields". A "primary key" assigns a field to its "special order table". For example, the "Doctor Last Name" field might be assigned as a primary key of the Doctor table with all people having same last name organized alphabetically according to the first three letters of their first name.
Therefore, a relation can have multiple candidate keys, each with a different number of attributes. [2] Specific candidate keys are sometimes called primary keys, secondary keys or alternate keys. 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.
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 ...
An associative (or junction) table maps two or more tables together by referencing the primary keys (PK) of each data table. In effect, it contains a number of foreign keys (FK), each in a many-to-one relationship from the junction table to the individual data tables. The PK of the associative table is typically composed of the FK columns ...
The foreign key is typically a primary key of an entity it is related to. The foreign key is an attribute of the identifying (or owner , parent , or dominant ) entity set . Each element in the weak entity set must have a relationship with exactly one element in the owner entity set, [ 1 ] and therefore, the relationship cannot be a many-to-many ...