SQL Query optimization - Part-7

(The you need referential integrity for more than referential integrity edition)

Why do we tag our blog posts with well, tags, so that people can glean meaningful information from these terse blocks of text. A post tagged with vacation or tutorial says so much about the blog post. Similarly, hinting the DB that a certain column has a similar looking entry in some other table means a lot to the execution planner. Yes, I'm talking about Foreign Key references.

If it finds such a hint, it can infer that:

1. Every value in this column has some unique value in the column that it refers to.
2. Since it is pointing to a UNIQUE column, joining a column from this table will match exactly 1 row from the table to which it refers to. Hence, while NATURAL JOINing the 2 tables, the execution engine can stop when it finds one match.
3. A Foreign Key constraint forces you to make the referenced column UNIQUE. This means that a WHERE clause on that column will never match more than one row and the optimizer can take advantage of that. If such a query occurs as a subquery, then the optimizer can evaluate the sub-query first and replace the sub-query with a single constant which is the result of the inner query's execution.

All these optimizations can significantly reduce your query's execution time.