Why use Foreign Key constraints in MySQL?
I was wondering,
开发者_C百科What will be my motivation to use constraint as foreign key in MySQL, as I am sure that I can rule the types that are added?
Does it improve performance?
Foreign keys enforce referential integrity. These constraints guarantee that a row in a table order_details
with a field order_id
referencing an orders
table will never have an order_id
value that doesn't exist in the orders
table.
Foreign keys aren't required to have a working relational database (in fact MySQL's default storage engine doesn't support FKs), but they are definitely essential to avoid broken relationships and orphan rows (ie. referential integrity). The ability to enforce referential integrity at the database level is required for the C in ACID to stand.
As for your concerns regarding performance, in general there's a performance cost, but will probably be negligible. I suggest putting in all your foreign key constraints, and only experiment without them if you have real performance issues that you cannot solve otherwise.
One reason is that a set of tables with foreign key constraints cannot be sharded into multiple databases.
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