Home Forums Database Design Relational Theory Is My Foreign Key Table Unnecessary? RE: Is My Foreign Key Table Unnecessary?

  • January 3, 2018 at 5:09 am

    #1974188

    Phil Stratford - Wednesday, January 3, 2018 3:47 AM

    You're absolutely right that a sixth, seventh or even eighth value could be required in the future, but if that happened we could simply start writing the new value to the CHAR(10) column. 

    Yeah, 100%. However, it would require code modification, a new round of testing, and a deployment. Versus, add a row to a table. Not only is referential integrity of this sort good for the data, but it makes for faster & safer changes to your system. Let's not even mention that enforced referential integrity helps query performance (OK, let's mention it).

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