Beyond Foreign Keys | Hacker News Reader

Beyond Foreign Keys

lackofimagination.org

8 pointstie-in5 comments

I wonder how easy this will be to debug once it's used in a non trivial production environment.

All the other "we use thing relates to thing because structured data slows us down" I used were nightmares.

So the relations must be stored somewhere. I'm guessing a join table that includes the table names of each record, ie a 'polymorphic' join table?

You've guessed it right :) An entry in the relationship table looks something like this:

  {
    "id": 6,
    "sourceComp": "user",
    "sourceId": 2,
    "targetComp": "post",
    "targetId": 3,
    "type": "author",
    "createdAt": "2024-03-28T13:28:59.175Z",
    "updatedAt": "2024-03-28T13:28:59.175Z"
  }

I'm confused by the change from a schema view of the world into an API view of the world.

Isn't it still implemented as a foreign key?

No foreign keys are used. A separate database table is used to track relationships.

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