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An example of a database that has not enforced referential integrity. In this example, there is a foreign key (artist_id) value in the album table that references a non-existent artist — in other words there is a foreign key value with no corresponding primary key value in the referenced table.
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 ...
The primary keys within a database are used to define the relationships among the tables. When a PK migrates to another table, it becomes a foreign key (FK) in the other table. When each cell can contain only one value and the PK migrates into a regular entity table, this design pattern can represent either a one-to-one or one-to-many relationship.
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.
This convention is technically a constraint but it is neither a domain constraint nor a key constraint; therefore we cannot rely on domain constraints and key constraints to keep the data integrity. In other words – nothing prevents us from putting, for example, "Thick" for a book with only 50 pages – and this makes the table violate DKNF.
In database theory, a relation, as originally defined by E. F. Codd, [1] is a set of tuples (d 1,d 2,...,d n), where each element d j is a member of D j, a data domain. Codd's original definition notwithstanding, and contrary to the usual definition in mathematics, there is no ordering to the elements of the tuples of a relation.
For example, the "Doctor Last Name" field might be assigned as a primary key of the Doctor table with all people having same last name organized alphabetically according to the first three letters of their first name. A table can also have a foreign key which indicates that field is linked to the primary key of another table. [2]
The database schema is the structure of a database described in a formal language supported typically by a relational database management system (RDBMS). The term " schema " refers to the organization of data as a blueprint of how the database is constructed (divided into database tables in the case of relational databases ).