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.
