Referential Integrity Is Important For Databases

Referential integrity is a database constraint that ensures that references between data are indeed valid and intact. Referential integrity is a fundamental principle of database theory and arises from the notion that a database should not only store data, but should actively seek to ensure its quality. Here are some additional definitions that we found on the Web. • “Referential integrity in a relational database is consistency between coupled tables. Referential integrity is usually enforced by the combination of a primary key and a foreign key. For referential integrity to hold, any field in a table that is declared a foreign key can contain only values from a parent table's primary key field...” [5] • “[Referential integrity is] a feature provided by relational database management systems (RDBMS’s) that prevents users or applications from entering inconsistent data. Most RDBMS’s have various referential integrity rules that you can apply when you create a relationship between two tables.” [6]