Search Results fk_logical_name




Overview
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Overview

APPS.EDW_FOREIGN_KEY_COLUMNS_MD_V is a metadata dictionary view within the Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) 12.1.1 and 12.2.2 environment. It exposes the set of foreign key relationship definitions that describe how entities in the EBS data model relate to one another. The view is part of the Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) metadata layer, sometimes referred to as the ETRM (E-Business Suite Trading Community and Reporting Model / Enterprise Repository Metadata) framework, which supplies the structural knowledge required to build reporting, extract, and ETL pipelines over EBS tables. Rather than returning transactional data, this view returns descriptive metadata about foreign key constraints — their names, identifiers, logical names, and human-readable descriptions. The presence of the FK_DESCRIPTION column is significant because it allows report builders and integration developers to discover the semantic meaning of a relationship without parsing physical constraint names. The view is owned by the APPS schema, which is the standard connection point for EBS metadata and concurrent programs.

Underlying Base Objects

The view is defined over a single documented base object: EDW_FOREIGN_KEY_COLUMNS_MD. No additional base tables are documented in the ETRM metadata, and the view text confirms this by issuing a straightforward projection from that table with no joins, filters, or aggregations. The view text is a simple column selection:

Because the view is a thin projection, its performance characteristics and row counts mirror the underlying metadata table. Any refresh, patching, or seeding of EDW_FOREIGN_KEY_COLUMNS_MD in the underlying EBS data model is reflected immediately in the view.

Key Columns

The columns exposed describe both ends of each foreign key relationship — the referring (child) column and the referenced (parent) primary key column — along with identifying metadata.

  • ENTITY_ID / ENTITY_TYPE / ENTITY_NAME — Identify the owning entity, its classification, and its logical name within the EDW model.
  • FK_ID / FK_NAME / FK_LOGICAL_NAME — The foreign key identifier, physical constraint name, and logical name.
  • FK_DESCRIPTION — The human-readable description of the foreign key, the column most relevant to the user's search for "fk_description". This provides business-level meaning for the relationship.
  • PK_ID / PK_NAME — Identifier and name of the referenced primary key.
  • FK_COLUMN_ID / FK_COLUMN_NAME — Identifier and name of the foreign key column on the child entity.
  • FK_POSITION — Positional order for composite foreign keys, indicating the column's ordinal within the key.

Common Use Cases and Queries

This view is typically used for metadata discovery and documentation tasks, such as building entity-relationship diagrams, validating integration mappings, or generating data lineage reports. A common query retrieves descriptive metadata for all foreign keys belonging to a given entity:

  • SELECT ENTITY_NAME, FK_NAME, FK_LOGICAL_NAME, FK_DESCRIPTION, PK_NAME, FK_COLUMN_NAME, FK_POSITION FROM APPS.EDW_FOREIGN_KEY_COLUMNS_MD_V WHERE ENTITY_NAME = :p_entity ORDER BY FK_NAME, FK_POSITION;

To search specifically on the description text, as prompted by the "fk_description" query, a developer can filter on that column directly:

  • SELECT FK_NAME, FK_LOGICAL_NAME, FK_DESCRIPTION FROM APPS.EDW_FOREIGN_KEY_COLUMNS_MD_V WHERE UPPER(FK_DESCRIPTION) LIKE '%CUSTOMER%';

For composite key analysis, ordering by FK_NAME and FK_POSITION reconstructs the column sequence that makes up each foreign key, which is useful when generating DDL or join conditions programmatically. Because the view exposes only metadata, it can be queried safely at any time without impacting transactional processing, making it a practical tool for metadata-driven report generation in both EBS 12.1.1 and 12.2.2.