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The table containing the foreign key is called the child table, and the table containing the candidate key is called the referenced or parent table. [4] In database relational modeling and implementation, a candidate key is a set of zero or more attributes, the values of which are guaranteed to be unique for each tuple (row) in a relation.
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.
In this, the "child" is the same type as the "parent". The hierarchy stating EmpNo 10 is boss of 20, and 30 and 40 each report to 20 is represented by the "ReportsTo" column. In Relational database terms, the ReportsTo column is a foreign key referencing the EmpNo column. If the "child" data type were different, it would be in a different table ...
An associative (or junction) table maps two or more tables together by referencing the primary keys (PK) of each data table. In effect, it contains a number of foreign keys (FK), each in a many-to-one relationship from the junction table to the individual data tables. The PK of the associative table is typically composed of the FK columns ...
In this case the logical primary key for AB is formed from the two foreign keys (i.e. copies of the primary keys of A and B). In web application frameworks such as CakePHP and Ruby on Rails, a many-to-many relationship between entity types represented by logical model database tables is sometimes referred to as a HasAndBelongsToMany (HABTM ...
If a foreign key table is established for a table of 'Plants' attributes, no integrity is given to the child attribute data of 'Trees' and its child 'Oak'. Therefore, in each case of an item inserted into the tree, a foreign key table of the item's attributes must be created for all but the most trivial of use cases.
The referential integrity rule states that any foreign-key value can only be in one of two states. The usual state of affairs is that the foreign-key value refers to a primary key value of some table in the database. Occasionally, and this will depend on the rules of the data owner, a foreign-key value can be null. In this case, we are ...
A foreign key is one side of the relationship that shows a row or multiple rows, with one of those rows being the primary key already listed on the first table. This is also called a foreign key constraint, which is important to keep data from being duplicated and have relationships within the database stay reliable as more information is added.