Is it alright to create foreign keys that are not really foreign keys in a database?

What you are talking about is a planned data denormalization. You might be better off creating views for reporting which access the tables. That way you don't have to alter your tables and their integrity (or store redundancy), but you can still use the associations in reporting.

– johnny Sep 12 at 20:29 1 @johnny: JOIN's aren't necessarily bad - if you put nonclustered indices on all the foreign key columns – marc_s Sep 12 at 21:16.

I see what you are doing. To me, what you have currently is perfectly fine; you don't need to add an extra field 'user_id' to franchise. Since a user has a relationship to a company, and a company has a relationship to a franchise; a user does have a connection to the franchise.

You may want to create a View to show everything instead of adding an extra field to a table.

Right, but if you are following normalization rules it would be redundant to store the user_id in the franchise table, besides it could lead to 'update anomalies', or so I am told. – wllmsaccnt Sep 12 at 19:07 I agree, that is what I am saying. What he has there currently, franchise does not have a user_id, but he is asking if he should add a user_id to franchise, would be bad practice.

– TIHan Sep 12 at 19:08 Oh, you meant what he had was fine....as in "don't add the user_id to franchise", not the other way around. Gotcha. – wllmsaccnt Sep 12 at 19:09.

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