Hacker News Reader

Comment by magicalhippo | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar suggestion the other day[1], except I chose what to me sounded more English-sounding:

    JOIN films f USING FOREIGN KEY

Here the explicit foreign key, films_did_fkey in this case, could be specified after FOREIGN KEY. This would be similar in syntax to when you force an index for a select statement, at least in the DB we use.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687565

View on HN

Yeah I think something like this is the way to go. The table name needs to be listed in a consistent manner like all other joins, and I don't think the syntax should be different depending on which order the tables are listed in.

With the above proposal, it seems the foreign key name could be left out in the common case of there being only one fkey between the two tables too.

> With the above proposal, it seems the foreign key name could be left out in the common case of there being only one fkey between the two tables too.

Yes, this was indeed my intention. The common case with only a single matching foreign key constraint would not require being explicit, but one could be if needed in a natural way.

    JOIN films f USING FOREIGN KEY films_did_fkey

Reply on news.ycombinator.com