Re: Indexed PF vs. LF performance

I realize you're just trying to come up with an example so I'll throw out
the argument that keying by a person's name is silly (for the reason you
gave).

Let's say I accept that you couldn't change a PF key (many decades ago).
Well, you should have stopped there. Because when you started on about
child files you lost me. It's not like people used Referential Integrity
constraints years ago. It was easy to delete a parent and leave all those
orphans. How did not keying the PF help? Actually it's easier nowadays
to do this. You can set up the foreign key constraints to "cascade". So
if Miss A becomes Miss B it would cascade the key change down through all
the child files. Back in troglodyte times wouldn't you have had to write
a program to cascade that key change down through the children regardless
of whether or not the key was on the PF or in a LF?


Rob Berendt