Although primary keys are a function of individual tables, if you created databases that consisted of only independent and unrelated tables, you'd have little need for them. Primary keys become essential, however, when you start to create relationships that join together multiple tables in a database. A foreign key is a column in a table used to reference a primary key in another table.
Continuing the example presented in the last section, let's say that you choose CustomerId as the primary key for tblCustomer. Now define a second table, tblOrder, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. CustomerId is a foreign key in tblOrder which can be used to reference a customer stored in the tblCustomer table.CustomerId is considered a foreign key in tblOrder since it can be used to refer to given customer (i.e., a row in the tblCustomer table).
It is important that both foreign keys and the primary keys that are used to reference share a common meaning and draw their values from the same domain. Domains are simply pools of values from which columns are drawn. For example, CustomerId is of the domain of valid customer ID #'s, which in this case might be Long Integers ranging between 1 and 50,000. Similarly, a column named Sex might be based on a one-letter domain equaling 'M' or 'F'. Domains can be thought of as user-defined column types whose definition implies certain rules that the columns must follow and certain operations that you can perform on those columns.
Microsoft Access supports domains only partially. For example, Microsoft Access will not let you create a relationship between two tables using columns that do not share the same datatype (e.g., text, number, date/time, etc.). On the other hand, Microsoft Access will not prevent you from joining the Integer column EmployeeAge from one table to the Integer column YearsWorked from a second table, even though these two columns are obviously from different domains.
Continuing the example presented in the last section, let's say that you choose CustomerId as the primary key for tblCustomer. Now define a second table, tblOrder, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. CustomerId is a foreign key in tblOrder which can be used to reference a customer stored in the tblCustomer table.
It is important that both foreign keys and the primary keys that are used to reference share a common meaning and draw their values from the same domain. Domains are simply pools of values from which columns are drawn. For example, CustomerId is of the domain of valid customer ID #'s, which in this case might be Long Integers ranging between 1 and 50,000. Similarly, a column named Sex might be based on a one-letter domain equaling 'M' or 'F'. Domains can be thought of as user-defined column types whose definition implies certain rules that the columns must follow and certain operations that you can perform on those columns.
Microsoft Access supports domains only partially. For example, Microsoft Access will not let you create a relationship between two tables using columns that do not share the same datatype (e.g., text, number, date/time, etc.). On the other hand, Microsoft Access will not prevent you from joining the Integer column EmployeeAge from one table to the Integer column YearsWorked from a second table, even though these two columns are obviously from different domains.
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