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A requirement of E. F. Codd in his seminal paper is that a primary key of an entity, or any part of it, can never take a null value. [1] The relational model states that every relation (or table ) must have an identifier, called the primary key (abbreviated PK), in such a way that every row of the same relation be identifiable by its content ...
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.
Index data are system data distinct from user data, and consist primarily of pointers. Changes in a database (by insert, delete, or modify operations), may require indexes to be updated to maintain accurate user data accesses. [1] Index locking is a technique used to maintain index integrity. A portion of an index is locked during a database ...
To reduce such index size, some systems allow including non-key fields in the index. Non-key fields are not themselves part of the index ordering but only included at the leaf level, allowing for a covering index with less overall index size. This can be done in SQL with CREATE INDEX my_index ON my_table (id) INCLUDE (name);. [8] [9]
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 ...
Domain-key normal form (DK/NF or DKNF) is a normal form used in database normalization which requires that the database contains no constraints other than domain constraints and key constraints. A domain constraint specifies the permissible values for a given attribute, while a key constraint specifies the attributes that uniquely identify a ...
The relational algebra uses set union, set difference, and Cartesian product from set theory, and adds additional constraints to these operators to create new ones.. For set union and set difference, the two relations involved must be union-compatible—that is, the two relations must have the same set of attributes.
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 ...