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In relational database management systems, a unique key is a candidate key. All the candidate keys of a relation can uniquely identify the records of the relation, but only one of them is used as the primary key of the relation. The remaining candidate keys are called unique keys because they can uniquely identify a record in a relation.
To discover such errors, one must perform a query that uses a left outer join between the table with the foreign key and the table with the primary key, showing both key fields in addition to any fields required to distinguish the record; all invalid foreign-key values will have the primary-key column as NULL. The need to perform such a check ...
Single table inheritance is a way to emulate object-oriented inheritance in a relational database. When mapping from a database table to an object in an object-oriented language , a field in the database identifies what class in the hierarchy the object belongs to. [ 1 ]
A requirement of E. F. Codd in his seminal paper is that a primary key of an entity, or any part of it, can never take a null value. [1] The relational model states that every relation (or table ) must have an identifier, called the primary key (abbreviated PK), in such a way that every row of the same relation be identifiable by its content ...
In the relational model of databases, a primary key is a designated attribute that can reliably identify and distinguish between each individual record in a table.The database creator can choose an existing unique attribute or combination of attributes from the table (a natural key) to act as its primary key, or create a new attribute containing a unique ID that exists solely for this purpose ...
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.
Entity integrity is an integrity rule which states that every table must have a primary key and that the column or columns chosen to be the primary key should be unique and not null. Referential integrity concerns the concept of a foreign key. The referential integrity rule states that any foreign-key value can only be in one of two states.
The advantages of using a natural key to uniquely identify records in a relation include less disk space usage, the natural key is an attribute that is related to the business or the real world so in most cases, it is already being stored in the relation which saves disk space as compared to creating a new column for storing the surrogate key.