On Mon, Mar 29, 2021, at 20:53, Vik Fearing wrote: > On 3/29/21 7:55 PM, Joel Jacobson wrote: > > Do you know if REF is meant to be a replacement for foreign keys? > > > > Are they a different thing meant to co-exist with foreign keys, > > or are they actually foreign keys "under the hood" > > or something else entirely? > > They're supposed to be OOP where each row in the typed table is an > instance of the object. Types can also have methods associated with > them, and the instance tables can have subtables similar to our table > inheritance. The dereference operator is replaced by a subquery. > > There is a whole slew of things in this area of the standard that > apparently never caught on.
Hmm. Since it never caught on, maybe it was partly due to too much complexity, and maybe can invent a simpler solution? I would also be against this idea if the complexity cost would be too high, but I think Tom's foreign key constraint name idea looks fruitful since it's simple and non-invasive. /Joel
