I just did something which seems to work alright and which makes sense
to me now but which I have a funny feeling about. It may be good
standard practice (and I just don't know about it) or dangerously
foolish or just plain silly: I created a foreign key reference on a
column that is also the primary key for this table as in
create table institute (
id int4 references index ( id ) PRIMARY KEY,. . .
and then used that column as a reference for a foreign key constraint in
a couple of other tables:
create table boss (
institute_id int4 references institute ( id ),. . .
create table staff (
institute_id int4 references institute ( id ),. . .
I am not really sure what happens when I delete or modify the id column
in the table at the top of this "chain". Except for this uncertainty I
don't think this scheme would pose a problem, but I may be wrong. Can
anyone enlighten me?
Ta, Frank