[ZODB-Dev] Referential integrity

[Patrick K. O'Brien]

Toby Dickenson wrote:
>
> On Fri, 1 Mar 2002 16:39:54 +0100, Arnaud Bienvenu
> <arnaud.bienvenu@makina-corpus.org> wrote:
>
> >because I don't want them to refer to some country that is not in the
> >official list.
>
> Youve just highlighted one of the difference between referential
> integrity in ZODB and relational databases: In ZODB it is possible for
> a person to have a reference to a country which is not in the official
> list/table of countries. In other words, not all countries have to be
> in the official list/table.
>

Sometimes you want the flexibility, sometimes you want the constraint. I
think it should be easier to do both. Leaving it entirely up to the
application developer is burdensome and leaves too much room for getting it
wrong. Anyone used to the integrity provided by an RDBMS will find this
unacceptable. Corporate customers expect the integrity of their data to be
protected.

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Patrick K. O'Brien
Orbtech