I have a pretty good understanding of MySQL but still having some trouble with foreign keys. For my website i have a user with its basic information (first name, last name, state...) and each user that is entered to the database can be rated unlimited number of times in a handful of categories. What i currently have is my standard users table, and the ratings table has the different rating categories along with a standard PK id column, and a user_id column (which acts as a FK). I was wondering if there are any actual benefits to setting up a FK constraint other than to preserve integrity? Will it make it easier to access and update data? Also i saw that you can only use FK with innodb engines, does this support full text searching?