Jonathan Bartlett wrote:
>Why not just drop the "references" clause? I mean, the point of having
>transactions is to guarantee integrity within a transaction, if you're not
>going to have that, why even bother with the clause?
>
Quite the opposite - the point is to guaratee the integrity *outside*
the transaction.
You can set the constraints to be 'deferred', so that the referential
integrity only gets verified at the time you commit your transaction-
this way you can allow 'temporary' violations of the constraints inside
your transactions, while still being guaranteed that all the data that
actually gets committed satisfies all of your constraints.
>
>Most of my databases don't even user "references", just because I like the
>flexibility, and I have multitable keys (keys that can refer to rows from
>multiple tables).
>
>
Not much to brag about :-)
Dima