Re: FOREIGN KEYS vs PERFORMANCE

On Apr 12, 2006, at 4:13 , Rodrigo Sakai wrote:

> I think this is an old question, but I want to know if it really
> is well worth to not create some foreign keys an deal with the
> referential integrity at application-level?????

If I had to choose between one or the other, I'd leave all
referential integrity in the database and deal with the errors thrown
when referential integrity is violated in the application. PostgreSQL
is designed to handle these kinds of issues. Anything you code in
your application is more likely to contain bugs or miss corner cases
that would allow referential integrity to be violated. PostgreSQL has
been pounded on for years by a great many users and developers,
making the likelihood of bugs still remaining much smaller.

Of course, you can add some referential integrity checks in your
application code, but those should be in addition to your database-
level checks.

Michael Glaesemann
grzm myrealbox com