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I'm creating a website with Laravel for the first time. I checked relationships documentation today and it seems that Laravel just uses simple SQL queries.

class User extends Eloquent {

    public function phone()
    {
        return $this->hasOne('Phone');
    }

}

$phone = User::find(1)->phone;

And it's basically a select * from phones where user_id = 1 query. So the question is, should I use foreign keys anyway in my database to create relationships?

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Isn't user_id a foreign key? –  JeffO Jan 5 at 22:21

1 Answer 1

up vote 1 down vote

Using the exact same words from @JeffO 

"Isn't user_id a foreign key?"

I think the problem is not necessarilly setting a foreign key or not. The problem is how much do you need to depend on the database features.

On Laravel you will set your foreign keys while adding your migrations: 

http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/schema#foreign-keys

But if you for any reason/error have user having direct access to the database or using php features without the framework or whatever other issue the might not only rely on the framework, it is a best practice to add your database foreign keys.

Finally on the other hand, I already worked on projects where they decided not to have foreign keys and rely only on the frameworks validations for maintenance reasons.

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