keymaster wrote: > A final question: how important are REAL foreign keys in the database, > if you are using cake associations. Are they superfluous? Are they > still needed?
It depends on what you're doing. They are extremely important if your database offers read-write access to more than one application from the same set of tables. A large majority of those who have swallowed the Rails-like pill have never worked with large-scale databases and do not understand the necessity of enforcing integrity with foreign keys, triggers and stored procedures. On the other hand, if your database isn't mission critical or if you only have one application accessing your core tables then you can do away with these sorts of things BUT you need to be certain that your application is enforcing any rules as need be. A proper database will usually do these things much better than you will and I would hazard a guess that they contain fewer bugs then your application logic (or rather, that their bugs are better documented). Some systems (as in Siebel and friends) do not use foreign keys but provide a set of integration tables that are used by external systems to populate and manipulate the data in the core set of tables; these tables are often handled by batch processes of some kind. I don't believe that Cake reads and understands foreign keys at this time... I would hope that this would be the case at some point but it may not happen for a while (or ever, depending on how the Cake developers feel about this). Cheers, Matt -- BASIC: A programming language. Related to certain social diseases in that those who have it will not admit it in polite company. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Cake PHP" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/cake-php?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
