Is it better to use foreign keys in tables or can the same results be achieved with joins?
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Is it better to use foreign keys in tables or can the same results be achieved with joins?
Foreign keys are just constraints to enforce referential integrity. You will still need to use JOINs to build your queries.
Foreign keys guarantee that a row in a table
order_detailswith a fieldorder_idreferencing anorderstable will never have anorder_idvalue that doesn’t exist in theorderstable. Foreign keys aren’t required to have a working relational database (in fact MySQL’s default storage engine doesn’t support FKs), but they are definitely essential to avoid broken relationships and orphan rows (ie. referential integrity).