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Archives of the TeradataForum
Message Posted: Wed, 04 Aug 1999 @ 16:34:38 GMT
| Subj: | | Re: Referential Integrity Use |
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| From: | | John K. Wight |
I have never used RI (recent to TD) in a data warehouse environment where Teradata 'lives'. One main reason is that in an environment
like this, I want to know what doesn't match and if I enforce RI, I will never get the parent/child violations that I want to know about.
In an OLTP world RI is important to enforce - however, I have sourced a lot of data from DB2, Oracle, etc. (where RI was supposed to be
enforced) in the my life of TD Data Warehousing and have found (to my customer's amazement) RI violations in the warehouse. I use a simple
SQL shell at the points of interest that will report violations and this has always allowed the customer to go back and 'fix' the OLTP
data/RI constraints. Don't know if this helps? Bill Inmon also advocates not using RI in a warehouse for the same reasons I mentioned
above.
I guess a good question is, wouldn't you want to know where your OLTP data is 'broken'? It can and does exist!
JK
John K. Wight
Senior Solutions Consultant - Retail Solutions Group
NCR Corp.
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