Integers, Arrays, Foreign Keys, Inheritance

The talk will cover several patterns of using arrays, including query optimizations in comparison with classical relational model which has no arrays; making referential integrity with arrays, and when table inheritance is used.

We study several cases, in which arrays are useful, and give recipies for using them. One of the cases is JOIN reduction in many-to-many connections. Arrays _can_ help with performance here, but a referential integrity problem arises. We solve it and, by the same approach, learn to provide foreign keys for inherited tables. Also we study indexes and various operations on arrays provided by the intarray extension.