This ERD is part of my school work and something doesn't seem right. The ERD table 'Course' looks like its referencing 2 tables. Is the column titled 'Qual_Code' in table 'Course' from the 'Prerequisite' table, the 'Qualification' table or both? I don't think its both because you cannot have a single column with a foreign key that references two different tables.
Help because I have to write the SQL codes for this!
At the first glance, it appears that the column qual_code of the COURSE table is redundant. When writing the DDL code for this, you can include or exclude this column - see the following examples:
course table with qual_code column
course table without qual_code column
The PREREQUISITE table maps courses to qualifications. The PK constraint in this table will not allow NULLs in either of the columns ie if a row gets INSERTed, it must contain values for both course_num and qual_code.
I don't think its both because you cannot have a single column with a
foreign key that references two different tables.
It seems that you are misinterpreting this. The PK column of the QUALIFICATION table is referenced twice (FK columns reference a PK or UNIQUE column, not the other way round -> see the DDL code on DBfiddle).
Related
I have encountered a situation while developing a star schema. I have a table like this
Name
Email
amy
amy#gmail.com
jess
amy#gmail.com
I want to find the key column as foreign key for Fact table as you can see there is a duplication of records if look individually but unique if consider both column as a key column
Your help will be highly regarded
I am assuming from your question that the table is a dimension? If that is the case then it should have a surrogate key as its PK (as every dimension table should) and you use this to join to fact tables.
This may seem like a simple question, but I am stumped:
I have created a database about cars (in Oracle SQL developer). I have amongst other tables a table called: Manufacturer and a table called Parentcompany.
Since some manufacturers are owned by bigger corporations, I will also show them in my database.
The parentcompany table is the "parent table" and the Manufacturer table the "child table".
for both I have created columns, each having their own Primary Key.
For some reason, when I inserted the values for my columns, I was able to use the same value for the primary key of Manufacturer and Parentcompany
The column: ManufacturerID is primary Key of Manufacturer. The value for this is: 'MBE'
The column: ParentcompanyID is primary key of Parentcompany. The value for this is 'MBE'
Both have the same value. Do I have a problem with the thinking logic?
Or do I just not understand how primary keys work?
Does a primary key only need to be unique in a table, and not the database?
I would appreciate it if someone shed light on the situation.
A primary key is unique for each table.
Have a look at this tutorial: SQL - Primary key
A primary key is a field in a table which uniquely identifies each
row/record in a database table. Primary keys must contain unique
values. A primary key column cannot have NULL values.
A table can have only one primary key, which may consist of single or
multiple fields. When multiple fields are used as a primary key, they
are called a composite key.
If a table has a primary key defined on any field(s), then you cannot
have two records having the same value of that field(s).
Primary key is table-unique. You can use same value of PI for every separate table in DB. Actually that often happens as PI often incremental number representing ID of a row: 1,2,3,4...
For your case more common implementation would be to have hierarchical table called Company, which would have fields: company_name and parent_company_name. In case company has a parent, in field parent_company_name it would have some value from field company_name.
There are several reasons why the same value in two different PKs might work out with no problems. In your case, it seems to flow naturally from the semantics of the data.
A row in the Manufacturers table and a row in the ParentCompany table both appear to refer to the same thing, namely a company. In that case, giving a company the same id in both tables is not only possible, but actually useful. It represents a 1 to 1 correspondence between manufacturers and parent companies without adding extra columns to serve as FKs.
Thanks for the quick answers!
I think I know what to do now. I will create a general company table, in which all companies will be stored. Then I will create, as I go along specific company tables like Manufacturer and parent company that reference a certain company in the company table.
To clarify, the only column I would put into the sub-company tables is a column with a foreign key referencing a column of the company table, yes?
For the primary key, I was just confused, because I hear so much about the key needing to be unique, and can't have the same value as another. So then this condition only goes for tables, not the whole database. Thanks for the clarification!
Very new to SQL and have spent a day on this already.
Here are my two tables:
Centre(cid, name, location, nurse_supervisor)
Nurse(nid, name, centre_id, certificate)
I have a big problem. The (nurse_supervisor) in Centre is a foreign key to Nurse (nid).
The (centre_id) in Nurse is a foreign key to (Centre cid).
I can't figure out how to populate these tables. I have tried:
INSERT ALL, which produces "A foreign key value has no matching primary key value"
I have tried removing the foreign key constraints and adding them after populating the tables but when I do that it says I can't add a constraint to tables with preexisting data.
I tried removing NOT NULL - but realized that was silly as the constraints will be enforced anyways.
Everything I look through says populate the parent table first and then the child, but these tables are linked to each other.
I am using SQL developer.
This is a poor schema design, but one way to get around it would be to:
Make both centre_id and nurse_supervisor columns NULL in the two table definitions
Insert all rows into both tables, but with NULL for those two columns
Update centre_id to the correct value for each row in the Nurse table
Update nurse_supervisor to the correct value for each row in the Centre table
I have two tables
Department
Professor
in which Department has an attribute called HeadID referencing Professor
and Professor has an attribute called DeptID referencing Department
They form a circular relationship.
But the problem is that, how to insert a row to any of these tables?
Oracle complained "parent key not found" after I tried insert a row.
You can define one of the foreign key constraints as DEFERRABLE and defer constraint checking until the end of your transaction (instead of checking at the end of statement which ends with "parent key not found"). Read here
The other solutions described here are simpler.
But if you really want the DB to describe your buisiness (which is not necessarily the best approach) then you can have another table, lets say DEPT_HEAD_POSITIONS. the Department table will have the FK (HeadID) refer to this table, and the Professor table will have another nullable field as a FK to this new table.
Now, what you have is:
departments head positions
departments (that must have a head position)
professors (which must belong to a department and may be head of the department)
It is possible for a foreign key consisting of multiple columns to allow one of the columns to contain a value for which there is no matching value in the referenced columns, per the SQL-92 standard. To avoid this situation, create NOT NULL constraints on all of the foreign key's columns
for reference
so I think you can insert data in one of the row without giving value in foreign key column and then insert row into second row referring value of primary key in the first table and then you can proceed ...
If you have the authority to redesign the schema you should. If not I think the simplest and best approach is described in deathApril's comment.
In the use case where you want to add a new department and a new professor who heads it, you're best of:
Adding the Professor under a different department
Adding the Department with the Professor from Step 1 as head
Updating the Professor record from Step 1 to refer to his new Department created in Step 2
Oracle and SQL Server do not allow circular referencing because there is always a problem when deleting a row from a table having dependencies to another row from another table (foreign key) which refers to the row being deleted.....
For more Info: Click here
I have two tables and I want to use the database to enforce a constraint against them.
Table A has a one to many relationship with table B, that is many table B rows belong to exactly one table A row. Table B has a column of the Table A primary key that it belongs to. Anyway, I want to add a column to both table A and table B where the value of it in a table A record must equal the value of it in the corresponding table B records.
I want to tell SQL Server 2000 to disallow updates or additions of table B records unless the values in the sister columns are the same. How can I do this? I tried using a check constraint but it doesn't like subqueries. Will I have to venture into the world of triggers? Is there another way?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Isaac
What you're trying to do sounds like a foreign key relationship - but you already seem to have that (Table B has a column of Table A primary key).
I don't think you can define such a constraint - CHECK constraints cannot span tables, as far as I know. So in the end, you will probably need to use triggers instead on both tables to achieve this.