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Add a referential-integrity / foreign-keys explanation page #218
The book has a dedicated Foreign Keys chapter (30-design/030-foreign-keys.md); the docs split FK material between explanation/entity-integrity.md and the how-to/model-relationships.ipynb how-to, with no dedicated referential-integrity explanation page — an asymmetry with the book's entity-key / foreign-key structure.
Concepts currently missing:
A foreign key is a runtime logical constraint, not a physical pointer — an insert triggers a search of the parent to verify a matching key exists; it is not a disk link. (The HDF5-pointer contrast is worth keeping.)
The five effects of a foreign key — schema embedding, insert restriction on the child, delete restriction on the parent (cascade), update restriction on keys, and automatic index creation. They're never enumerated together, and the auto-index effect is entirely absent from the docs.
Proposal: add explanation/referential-integrity.md covering both, plus the "referential integrity is impossible without entity integrity" dependency (now added to entity-integrity.md in PR #216 — link it).
From an internal datajoint-book → docs coverage review (priority P2).
Addressed by #227, which added explanation/referential-integrity.md — foreign key as a runtime logical constraint (not a pointer), the five effects of an FK including automatic index creation, and the "referential integrity is impossible without entity integrity" dependency. Closing.
Activity
docs: add Data Integrity, Referential Integrity, and Transactions exp…
dimitri-yatsenko commentedon Jul 21, 2026
Addressed by #227, which added
explanation/referential-integrity.md— foreign key as a runtime logical constraint (not a pointer), the five effects of an FK including automatic index creation, and the "referential integrity is impossible without entity integrity" dependency. Closing.