Are foreign keys really necessary in a database design?

Question

As far as I know, foreign keys (FK) are used to aid the programmer to manipulate data in the correct way. Suppose a programmer is actually doing this in the right manner alr

Answer 1

Yes. The ON DELETE [RESTRICT|CASCADE] keeps developers from stranding data, keeping the data clean. I recently joined a team of Rails developers who did not focus on database constraints such as foreign keys.

Luckily, I found these: http://www.redhillonrails.org/foreign_key_associations.html -- RedHill on Ruby on Rails plug-ins generate foreign keys using the convention over configuration style. A migration with product_id will create a foreign key to the id in the products table.

Check out the other great plug-ins at RedHill, including migrations wrapped in transactions.