On Monday 27 April 2009 21:54:12 David Fetter wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 09:50:13PM +0300, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > On Monday 27 April 2009 20:10:27 David Fetter wrote:
> > > While we're at it, can we see about moving foreign keys out of the
> > > "advanced" section? They've been standard for many years. Heck,
> > > even MySQL has had them, at least in some of their engines, for
> > > many years.
> >
> > Advanced doesn't have to mean nonstandard, and standard doesn't have
> > to mean basic.
>
> Are you seriously arguing that foreign keys aren't basic? Seriously?
In your words: yes.
But it's all relative. Among all the topics that are covered in the tutorial,
foreign keys have certain prerequisite topics, such as logging into the
database, creating tables, and putting data in. Certain things have to come
before others, and sections are used to organize the information. You can
relabel the sections to "Really Basic" and "Somewhat Basic", if it helps you.
In some way, everything that is covered in the tutorial ought to be "basic".
But some things are more basic than others. You could equally make the
argument that views and transactions are basic, but then there would be hardly
anything interesting left in the "advanced" section, especially if you add the
argument that inheritance and window functions could be considered by some as
very esoteric features that shouldn't be in the tutorial at all.