Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
In a relational database, a weak entity is an entity that cannot be uniquely identified by its attributes alone; therefore, it must use a foreign key in conjunction with its attributes to create a primary key. 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 ...
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 ...
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 domain of one or more attributes in the referencing relation. The concept is described formally as: "For all tuples in the referencing relation projected over the referencing attributes, there must ...
Here ID serves as the primary key in the table 'Author', but also as AuthorID serves as a Foreign Key in the table 'Book'. The Foreign Key serves as the link, and therefore the connection, between the two related tables in this sample database. In a relational database, a candidate key uniquely identifies each row of data values in a database ...
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. A table can also have a foreign key which indicates that field is linked to the primary key of another table. [2]
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 ...
A relational database requires the implementation of a base relation (or base table) to resolve many-to-many relationships. A base relation representing this kind of entity is called, informally, an associative table. An associative entity (using Chen notation)