A Database Integrity Pattern Language

Patterns and Pattern Languages are ways to capture experience and make it reusable for others, and describe best practices and good designs. Patterns are solutions to recurrent problems. This paper addresses the database integrity problems from a pattern perspective. Even if the number of vendors of database management systems is quite high, the number of available solutions to integrity problems is limited. They all learned from the past experience applying the same solutions over and over again. The solutions to avoid integrity threats applied to in database management systems (DBMS) can be formalized as a pattern language. Constraints, transactions, locks, etc, are recurrent integrity solutions to integrity threats and therefore they should be treated accordingly, as patterns.