Dani Dani wrote in post #962064: > Thank you Marnen and Phoenix for your detailed explanations. > I do understand the functionality of the foreign key. I just was not > sure > whether relying on rails's foreign key functionaliy is good enough and > there is no need to do it directly on the database, but now reading > Phoenix's explanation, I understand that as long as only my rails > application is accessing the database, I can rely on rails's foreign key > functionality. Of
But you can never guarantee that. In virtually every Rails application I've worked on, I've needed to use a DB administration tool at some point to tweak a value or check a field definition. In other words, I've needed to use a non-Rails interface at some point, and therefore I've needed the data integrity checks of a foreign key constraint. Working without foreign key constraints is playing with fire. It may look like it is working, but you'll be setting yourself up for subtle bugs that may not be immediately obvious but will cause you no end of grief when they occur. Don't ever do that. Moral: if you care about the integrity of your data, you need physical constraints in the DB to ensure that integrity. If you don't care about that integrity, don't waste time storing the data. :) > > Thank you again. > > Dani Best, -- Marnen Laibow-Koser http://www.marnen.org mar...@marnen.org Sent from my iPhone -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Talk" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-t...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-talk+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-talk?hl=en.
