[Koha] MySQL and foreign keys

[Larry Currie]

Last night I attended a PerlMongers group meeting here in Oakland, CA
and one of the presenters at the meeting asserted that MySQL could not
claim to be a completely relational database because it doesn't let you
define foreign keys.  As a result, he feels that MySQL fails the ACID
test (atomicity, consistency, referential integrity, and durability),
and he advised people to avoid using it in Perl applications and instead
use Postgres or some other relational database with more stability.  He
cited an example where you might have a one-to-one relationship between
primary key values in two tables and if you deleted a value from one of
the tables, MySQL would leave that value in the other table as dangling
data without warning you to take care of it and as a result really mess
up your database.

Can anyone on the Koha list comment on this assertion and what the
consequences might be for Koha?

Larry Currie

--
Lawrence W. Currie
User Services Librarian
California Academy of Sciences
Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, CA 94118
lcurrie at calacademy.org
(415) 750-7108
(415) 750-7106 fax
http://www.calacademy.org/research/library/