datalevin 2026-08-06

I was surprised to read this in the book: "Because Datalevin is fact-oriented and flexible, it does not enforce traditional foreign-key constraints by default." Chaos! Is there a mode other than this default? 🙂 But reading further, I think I may have gotten the wrong meaning from the phrase. I think it intends to say that referential integrity is not only enforced, but guaranteed. However, as there are no "required" attributes, referential integrity extends only as far as the entity ID of the referent. Deleting an entity's attributes does not delete the entity ID. Instead, to delete an entity (including its attributes) and references to it, one may (blah blah).

This sentence can be rephrased to be less alarming sounding. 🙂