Is adding a foreign key relationship dangerous?

Question

As a programmer, adding a reference to an object is pretty safe but adding a foreign key relationship (I think) is pretty dangerous. By adding a FK relationship, ALL the queries that delete a row from this foreign table has to be updated to properly delete the foreign key that's tied to that row before actually deleting the row. How do you search for all the queries that delete a row from this foreign table? These queries can lie buried in code and in stored procedures. Is this a real life example of a maintenance nightmare? Is there a solution to this problem?

Answer 1

Your statement is simply not true. When establishing a foreign key relationship, you can set the cascading property to cascade delete . Once that's done, the child records will be deleted when the parent is deleted, ensuring that no records are orphaned.

Answer 2

如果您使用正确的ORM解决方案，正确配置FK和PK并启用级联删除，那么您应该不会有任何问题。

Answer 3

I wouldn't say so (to confirm what others mentioned) - that is usually taken care of with cascading deletes. Providing you want it that way - or with careful procedures that clean things behind.

The bigger system is you get to see more of the 'procedures' and less of the 'automation' (ie cascade deletes). For larger setups - DBA-s usually prefer to deal with that during database maintenance phase. Quite often, records are not allowed to be deleted, through middle-ware application code - but are simply marked as 'deleted' or inactive - and dealt with later on according to database routines and procedures in place in the organization (archived etc.).

And unless you have a very large code base, that's not a huge issue. Also, usually, most of the Db code goes through some DAL layer which can be easily traversed. Or you can also query system tables for all the relationships and 'dependencies' and many routines were written for such a code maintenance (on both sides of the 'fence'). It's not that it's not an 'issue', just nothing much different than normal Db work - and there're worse things than that.

So, I wouldn't lose my sleep over that . There are other issues with around using 'too much' of the referential integrity constraints (performance, maintenance) - but that is often a very controversial issue among DBA-s (and Db professionals in general), so I won't get into that:)

Answer 4

You should never design a relational database without foreign keys from the very beginning. That is a guarantee of poor data integrity over time.

You can add the code and use cascade delete as others have suggested, but that too is often the wrong answer. There are times when you genuinely want the delete stopped because you have child records. For instance, suppose you have customers and orders. If you delete a customer who has an order, then you lose the financial record of the order which is a disaster. Instead you would want the application to get an error saying an order exists for this customer. Further cascade delete could suddenly get you into deleting millions of child records thus locking up your datbase while a huge transaction happens. It is a dangerous practice that should rarely, if ever, be used in a production database.

Add the FK (if you have the relationships, it is needed) and then search for the code that deletes from that table and adjust it appropriately. Consider if a soft delete isn't a better option. This is where you mark a record as deleted or inactive, so it no longer shows up as a data entry option, but you can still see the existing records. Again you may need to adjust your database code fairly severly to implement this correctly. There is no easy fix for having a database that was badly designed from the start.

The soft delete is also a good choice if you think you will have many child records and actually do want to delete them. This way you can mark the records so they no longer show in the application and use a job that runs during non-peak hours to batch delete records.

If you are adding a new table and adding an FK, it is certainly easier to deal with becasue you would create the table before writing any code against it.