Guru Hints

### Foreign key covering indexes

A foreign key is used to couple two tables in a logical way, and restrict the changes that can be applied to them.

It all starts with a master table, which will be the referenced table. It needs to have a primary key (well, actually the referenced columns only need to be not null and covered by a unique index, but it's really good advice to have a primary key). The slave table depends on the master table, in the sense that the columns on which the foreign key is created must match the master table for any key inserted or updated. The slave table is the referencing table of the foreign key.

The foreign key not only restricts the referencing table, but also the referenced table; the flavour of restriction can be RESTRICT, CASCADE or SET NULL. This means, that if a row in the master/referenced table is changed (updated or deleted), all referencing tables are checked if the operation is valid, and if there's some additional action to perform; see the PostgreSQL documentation on foreign keys for further details.

This means that on change access to a specific row in the referenced table, a corresponding read is performed on all referencing tables, using the foreign key columns as access key. Consequently, all design rules which should be taken into account for good read performance usually also apply to columns in a referencing table. For good performance, an index is advisable in most cases. PostgreSQL does not enforce this in any way, so it's up to the database designer to provide an index.

For convenience, pgAdmin III provides a simple checkbox when creating a foreign key, which will automatically check for the presence of a usable index, and will create one for you if none is found. As with all indexes, there are rare cases when such an index degrades your overall performance a little, but in general having one index too few is much more performance degrading than having one index too much.