Jason Berkan (jason_berkan@canada.com) writes:
> Forgive me if this question has an obvious answer, but I am trying to
> figure out the "best practices" for designing a database, and am
> fairly new to SQL/relational databases, having worked with flat file
> databases for years.
>
> When you write the CREATE TABLE statements for a database, should you
> include the constraints as part of the create statement, or should the
> constraints be added later via ALTER TABLE statements?

Practice is likely to vary from site to site. I go for having
all constraints except foreign keys in the CREATE TABLE statement.
Foreign-key constraints I put in a file on their own, so when I
bulid a database, I can load the tables in any order and apply
foreign keys later.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, sommar@algonet.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinf...2000/books.asp