Rails 7.1 adds adapter option to disallow foreign keys

There are times when an application can choose not to use foreign keys. Data transfer between services is a tricky thing. When we are importing the data we need to import data in the right order if "foreign keys" are enabled. In such cases one might want to not enforce "foreign keys" and load the data and then add "foreign keys" constraint back.

Situations like this can be handled using migrations. Using migrations we can disable "foreign keys". However this would mean writing migrations for all the tables and removing all "foreign keys". This could be cumbersome.

1def change
2  create_table :authors do |t|
3    t.string :name
4    t.timestamps
5  end
6
7  create_table :books do |t|
8    t.belongs_to :author, foreign_key: false
9    t.datetime :published_at
10    t.timestamps
11  end
12end
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Rails 7.1 adds option to database.yml that enables skipping foreign key constraints usage even if the underlying database supports them and solves the above issue of writing migrations to disable foreign keys for all the tables.

1development:
2  <<: *default
3  database: db/development.sqlite3
4  foreign_keys: false
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Please check out this pull request for more details.