Re: [Koha-devel] MySQL and foreign keys

[Pat Eyler]

well, there are a couple of ways to respond.  First, MySQL does have
foreign keys:
http://www.mysql.com/doc/en/ANSI_diff_Foreign_Keys.html
(There area also some specific dis-advantages to using foreign key
enforcement listed near the bottom of the above document.)

Secondly, the question of whether of not MySQL is ACID capable has little
to do with its suitiblity for our purposes.  MySQL is frequently used by
serious websites to do serious business (NASA among them), I think that
properly used, MySQL is a completely valid choice for building an ILS.


-pate

Pat Eyler
Kaitiaki/manager               migrant Linux sys admin
the Koha project               ruby, shell, and perl geek
http://www.koha.org            http://pate.eylerfamily.org
On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Larry Currie wrote:

> Last night I attended a PerlMongers group meeting here in Oakland, CA
> and one of the presenters at the meeting asserted that MySQL could not
> claim to be a completely relational database because it doesn't let you
> define foreign keys.  As a result, he feels that MySQL fails the ACID
> test (atomicity, consistency, referential integrity, and durability),
> and he advised people to avoid using it in Perl applications and instead
> use Postgres or some other relational database with more stability.  He
> cited an example where you might have a one-to-one relationship between
> primary key values in two tables and if you deleted a value from one of
> the tables, MySQL would leave that value in the other table as dangling
> data without warning you to take care of it and as a result really mess
> up your database.
>
> Can anyone on the Koha list comment on this assertion and what the
> consequences might be for Koha?
>
> Larry Currie
>
> --
> Lawrence W. Currie
> User Services Librarian
> California Academy of Sciences
> Golden Gate Park
> San Francisco, CA 94118
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