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Primary & Foreign Key - 7

A primary key uniquely identifies records in a table and cannot contain null or duplicate values. To link two tables, the primary key of one table is added as a foreign key to the other table. For example, the Department ID primary key from the Department table was added to the Employee table as a foreign key. This creates a link between the tables and prevents invalid Department IDs from being added to the Employee table by using the Department table for validation.

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Vikram Bigamudre
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46 views2 pages

Primary & Foreign Key - 7

A primary key uniquely identifies records in a table and cannot contain null or duplicate values. To link two tables, the primary key of one table is added as a foreign key to the other table. For example, the Department ID primary key from the Department table was added to the Employee table as a foreign key. This creates a link between the tables and prevents invalid Department IDs from being added to the Employee table by using the Department table for validation.

Uploaded by

Vikram Bigamudre
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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A primary key is a field or group of fields that uniquely identify a record in a table.

Primary key fields cannot be NULL and cannot contain duplicate values. If you want to link two tables, then primary key of one table will be added to another table where primary key of first table will be become the foreign key of second table. Consider the following two tables. Department Table Department_ID (Primary Department_Name Key) 01 Computers 02 Physics 03 Electronics Employee Table Employee_ID (Primary Key) 001 002 003 004 Name Jim Jack Robin Raj Place New York London Sydney Bangalore

If you want to link department table and employee table, then add the primary key of department table i.e. Department_ID to employee table. Department_ID becomes the foreign key of employee table and Department table becomes the check table. Employee table after creating foreign key. Employee_ID (Primary Key) 001 002 003 004 Name Jim Jack Robin Raj Place New York London Sydney Bangalore Department_ID (Foreign Key) 01 01 02 03

The main purpose of the foreign key is data validation. This will not allow entering a Department_ID in the employee table that is not there in the department table. For example if you try to create a record in employee table with Department_ID as 04, it will throw an error.

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