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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-16T12:55:21+00:00

I’m looking at this database model and I’m confused about the PF in some

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I’m looking at this database model and I’m confused about the “PF” in some of the tables. My understanding is that the PF is a “Primary/Foreign key” which could also be a composite key. I understand this situation for a many-to-many relationship, but what about situations such as the Menu_Courses table? The primary key would obviously be an auto-incremented column of type int, but what about the menu_id field? How would that be implemented in a database such as SQL Server?

The author also explains PF fields on this page: http://www.databaseanswers.org/tutorial4_db_schema/tutorial_slide_5.htm

http://www.databaseanswers.org/data_models/recipes/index.htm

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  1. Editorial Team

    The way I understand it is that these fields are primary keys on the table they are defined on, and at the same time they are foreign keys to other tables.

    menu_courses has the reference to suggested_menus through menu_id and combined with course_number makes the primary key – that is each menu/course number combination is unique and uniquely identifies a row on the table.

    You would normally implement this as a foreign key field on the suggested_menus table.

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