Author: Alexey Makhotkin (Word count: 2900). Foreign keys are one topic that you cannot ignore if you want to talk about database design. In this informational two-pager I’d like to point out the following aspects of foreign key technology: foreign keys are only a partial solution to the problem of database consistency; in classic relational databases, eliminating foreign keys may be an easy performance win; in many real-world scenarios foreign keys could not be enforced even if the underl...
