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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 table (called the referencing table) can refer to a column (or a group of columns) in another table (the referenced table) by using a foreign key. The referenced column(s) in the referenced table must be under a unique constraint, such as a primary key. Also, self-references are possible (not fully implemented in MS SQL Server though [5]).
A key that may become the primary key. Primary The key that is selected as the primary key. Only one key within an entity is selected to be the primary key. This is the key that is allowed to migrate to other entities to define the relationships that exist among the entities.
In SQL, an INNER JOIN prevents a cartesian product from occurring when there are two tables in a query. For each table added to a SQL Query, one additional INNER JOIN is added to prevent a cartesian product. Thus, for N tables in an SQL query, there must be N−1 INNER JOINS to prevent a cartesian product.
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 ...
A surrogate key (or synthetic key, pseudokey, entity identifier, factless key, or technical key [citation needed]) in a database is a unique identifier for either an entity in the modeled world or an object in the database. The surrogate key is not derived from application data, unlike a natural (or business) key. [1]
In database systems, a propagation constraint "details what should happen to a related table when we update a row or rows of a target table" (Paul Beynon-Davies, 2004, p.108). Tables are linked using primary key to foreign key relationships.
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 does not contain a smaller one. Therefore ...