Foreign Key Constraint Identification in Relational Databases

For relational learning, it is important to know the relationships between the tables. In relational databases, the relationships can be described with foreign key constraints. However, the foreign keys may not be explicitly specified. In this article, we present how to automatically and quickly identify primary & foreign key constraints from metadata about the data. Our method was evaluated on 72 databases and has F-measure of 0.87 for foreign key constraint identification. The proposed method significantly outperforms in runtime related methods reported in the literature and is database vendor agnostic.