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Introduction
Foreign keys
Multicolumn foreign keys
Updates and deletes
Revision

Instruction

Excellent job! Ok, one more thing to make it slightly more complicated: remember that foreign key columns are columns like any other and they can be used just the way any other column is used. For instance they can be part of a primary key. Sounds vague? Take a look at the ERD:

The employee, job_history and position tables

We've got three tables.

The first one, employee, is a table we know already. It stores information about employees in our company.

The second table is called position. This is where we can keep information about the positions offered at our company, like accountant, junior associate etc.

There is also a third table called job_history which is meant to keep track of an employee's position history in the company, because each employee can work at various positions and each position can be occupied by various employees. Each row in the table job_history corresponds to a single employee (column employee_id) working on a single position (column position_id) from start_date until end_date. There is another column called seq which we added because each employee may work several times on the same position when their role in the company changes.

So, as you can see, the table job_history takes employee_id from the table employee as a foreign key and position_id from the table position, also as a foreign key. But these two values, together with the column seq, also create the primary key of the table job_history. Hence, employee_id and position_id are foreign keys and parts of the primary key at the same time.

Exercise

That was a lot of theory, wasn't it? Let's create the table in question, job_history. Use the ERD diagram above to help you.

Stuck? Here's a hint!

Type

CREATE TABLE job_history (
  employee_id int,
  position_id int,
  seq int,
  start_date date  NOT NULL,
  end_date date  NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (employee_id, position_id, seq),
  FOREIGN KEY (employee_id) REFERENCES employee (id),
  FOREIGN KEY (position_id) REFERENCES position (id)
);