"At GitHub we do not use foreign keys, ever, anywhere" (2016)

Re:"At GitHub we do not use foreign keys, ever, anywhere" (2... by postalrat on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @08:56AM (#39103292)

You assume you will deal with mistakes later and that will be more costly than the effort implement foreign keys. That's a pretty big assumption that has been proven to be false in many cases.

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Re:"At GitHub we do not use foreign keys, ever, anywhere" (2... by gregjor on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @09:42AM (#39103914)

Implementing foreign key constraints requires next to no effort -- a single declaration in SQL. You need to think through the schema and the relationships but you have to do that in any case.

"Proven to be false in many cases" with not a single example is just an opinion without evidence. The benefit of foreign keys has decades of actual documentation.

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Re:"At GitHub we do not use foreign keys, ever, anywhere" (2... by postalrat on Tuesday January 23, 2024 @12:27PM (#39106472)

I'm going to assume you didn't read the linked thread because right there are examples of both.

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Re:"At GitHub we do not use foreign keys, ever, anywhere" (2... by gregjor on Wednesday January 24, 2024 @08:27AM (#39117037)

Assume what you want. Since I specifically mentioned migrations as a not so good reason to avoid foreign keys, in my opinion, I would think it's obvious I read the original article.

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