How to implement bidirectional relationship in Spring Spanner? - spring

Question

In code, I tried with #Interleaved in 1-many relationship at non-owning side to get child list. Could anyone help with below questions:
How to implement bidirectional relationship e.g. get parent from child for 1-1, 1-many relationship
Regarding many-many relationship, what are best practices to implement it and how to implement bidirectional relationship for it.
Thank you very much.

Answer 1

Cloud Spanner currently doesn't offer a way to enforce foreign-key constraints between non-interleaved tables. You will have to enforce such constraints in your application logic. You could use DML statements in Cloud Spanner(that come with the ability to read-your-writes in a Cloud Spanner transaction) to enforce these constraints at insert time by inserting into your tables as follows:
INSERT INTO Referenced(key1,value1) VALUES ('Referenced','Value1');
INSERT INTO Referencing(key2, value2, key1)
SELECT 'Referencing', 'Value2', key1 FROM Referenced WHERE
key1 = 'Referenced';
Running the two statements in a read-write transaction will ensure that the PK-FK relationship between the Referenced and Referencing table is always maintained at insert time. You may have to similarly modify update requests/SQL update statements in your application logic to enforce the PK-FK constraint for updates.

Answer 2

For a 1-many relationship, when using interleaved tables, then the child row's primary key already contains the primary key of its parent, so it is trivial to get the parent row.
CREATE TABLE parent (
parent_key INT64 NOT NULL,
...
) PRIMARY KEY (parent_key);
CREATE TABLE child (
parent_key INT64 NOT NULL,
child_key INT64 NOT NULL,
...
) PRIMARY KEY (parent_key, child_key),
INTERLEAVE IN PARENT parent ON DELETE CASCADE;
If for some reason you do not have the key of the parent, and only the key of the child, then for efficiency you would need to create an index for the reverse lookup:
CREATE INDEX child_to_parent_index
ON child (
child_key
);
and force use of that index when performing the query for the parent:
SELECT
p.*
FROM
parent as p
JOIN
child#{FORCE_INDEX=child_by_id_index} AS c ON p.parent_key = c.parent_key
WHERE
c.child_key = #CHILD_KEY_VALUE;
Many-many relationships would have to be implemented using a 'mapping' table linking table1-key to table2-key.
You will also need a top-level index to get efficient reverse-lookups, and use the FORCE_INDEX directive as above in your queries.
And as #adi mentioned, foreign key constraints would have to be enforced by the application.
CREATE TABLE table1 (
table1_key INT64 NOT NULL,
...
) PRIMARY KEY (table1_key);
CREATE TABLE table2 (
table2_key INT64 NOT NULL,
...
) PRIMARY KEY (table2_key);
CREATE TABLE table1_table2_map (
table1_key INT64 NOT NULL,
table2_key INT64 NOT NULL,
) PRIMARY KEY (table1_key, table2_key);
CREATE INDEX table2_table1_map_index
ON table1_table2_map (
table2_key
) STORING (
table1_key
);
Your application would be responsible for keeping the referential integrity of the mapping table - deleting the mapping rows when rows in table1 or table2 are deleted
If you want to use interleaved tables, then if your application needs to perform bi-directional lookups, you may have to create 2 mapping tables - as a child of each parent, so that finding the mappings from both directions are equally efficient.
CREATE TABLE table1 (
table1_key INT64 NOT NULL,
...
) PRIMARY KEY (table1_key);
CREATE TABLE table2 (
table2_key INT64 NOT NULL,
...
) PRIMARY KEY (table2_key);
CREATE TABLE table1_table2_map (
table1_key INT64 NOT NULL,
table2_key INT64 NOT NULL,
) PRIMARY KEY (table1_key, table2_key),
INTERLEAVE IN PARENT table1 ON DELETE CASCADE;
CREATE TABLE table2_table1_map (
table2_key INT64 NOT NULL,
table1_key INT64 NOT NULL,
) PRIMARY KEY (table2_key, table1_key),
INTERLEAVE IN PARENT table2 ON DELETE CASCADE;
Note that the application needs to keep both of these mapping tables up to date -- ie when deleting a row from table1, the application has to get the referenced table2_key values and delete the mappings from the table2_table1_map (and vice versa).