Kumar,
> While designing 3-4 different schemas for my
> database, a question has been chasing me. I am not a
> CS graduate and I was never taught the nitty gritty's
> of Dabase schema or rules.
Me neither. I learned the hard way, on the job.
> My question is - a schema that has no foreign key
> defined (except in 1 or 2 instances), will it be
> considered a good schema or bad schema by experts.
Bad, unless there's only 2 or 3 tables for your 1 or 2 joins.
> Imagine a scenario where most of the relations are
> defined by linker tables(relationship table) that is
> formed by two different primary keys from two
> different tables are defined to avoid foreign key
> relationships. creating a database in this kind of
> scenario, can it be considered a good database design.
But in that case you should have FKs from the linker tables.
--
--Josh
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco