Details: Ensuring data integrity with referential constraints

 

You might want to ensure data integrity with referential constraints for several reasons.

• To make sure that data values between files meet the rules of your business. For example, consider a business that maintains a list of customers in one file and a list of their accounts in another file. It does not make sense to allow the addition of an account if an associated customer does not exist. Likewise, it is not reasonable to delete a customer until you delete all of their accounts.

• To be able to define the relationships between data values.

• To have the system enforce the data relationships no matter what application makes changes.

• To improve the performance of integrity checks that are made at a high-level language (HLL) or SQL level by moving the checking into the database.

 

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Ensuring data integrity with referential constraints