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A NOT NULL constraint is functionally equivalent to the following check constraint with an IS NOT NULL predicate: CHECK (column IS NOT NULL) Some relational database management systems are able to optimize performance when the NOT NULL constraint syntax is used as opposed to the CHECK constraint syntax given above. [1]
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 ...
[1] 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.
Additionally, because SQL operators return Unknown when comparing anything with Null directly, SQL provides two Null-specific comparison predicates: IS NULL and IS NOT NULL test whether data is or is not Null. [8] SQL does not explicitly support universal quantification, and must work it out as a negated existential quantification.
The PK is a not empty set of attributes (or columns). The same format applies to the foreign key (abbreviated FK) because each FK matches a preexistent PK. Each of attributes being part of a PK (or of a FK) must have data values (such as numbers, letters or typographic symbols) but not data marks (also known as NULL marks in SQL world).
It is not required to specify all columns in the table since any other columns will take their default value or remain null: INSERT INTO table VALUES ( value1 , [ value2 , ... Example for inserting data into 2 columns in the phone_book table and ignoring any other columns which may be after the first 2 in the table.
Such a table would be able to accommodate duplicate rows, in violation of condition 3. A view whose definition mandates that results be returned in a particular order, so that the row-ordering is an intrinsic and meaningful aspect of the view. (Such views cannot be created using SQL that conforms to the SQL:2003 standard.) This violates ...
E. F. Codd mentioned nulls as a method of representing missing data in the relational model in a 1975 paper in the FDT Bulletin of ACM-SIGMOD.Codd's paper that is most commonly cited with the semantics of Null (as adopted in SQL) is his 1979 paper in the ACM Transactions on Database Systems, in which he also introduced his Relational Model/Tasmania, although much of the other proposals from ...