Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
Rails has no way of creating foreign keys in migrations (there are plugins to do this, however). There are also plenty of cascading options so you can get cascading deletes, for example.
With all of these options built in, is it worth creating foreign keys in the database? Is this something Rails developers normally avoid or what? You’d think if it was a recommended practice that Rails would natively support it.
This is something of a holy issue, because DHH (the creator of Rails) has stated before that he sees the database as essentially a giant hash table, so taking advantage of some of the things that database engines are good at by using features such as constraints or stored procedures is not considered The Rails Way by Rails purists.
That said, if you’d like to enforce the integrity of your data closest to the data, or if your database is shared by other applications then by all means use one of those plugins to create the foreign keys. After all, what harm could it do, right?