Referential integrity is a database management safeguard that ensures every foreign key matches a primary key.

For example, customer numbers in a customer file are the primary keys, and customer numbers in the order file are the foreign keys. If a customer record is deleted, the order records must also be deleted; otherwise they are left without a primary reference. If the DBMS does not test for this, it must be programmed into the applications.

Referential integrity in a relational database is consistency between coupled tables. Referential integrity is usually enforced by the combination of a primary key or candidate key (alternate 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 or a candidate key. For instance, deleting a record that contains a value referred to by a foreign key in another table would break referential integrity. A relational database management system (RDBMS) enforces referential integrity, normally either by deleting the foreign key rows as well to maintain integrity, or by returning an error and not performing the delete. Which method is used would be determined by the referential integrity constraint, as defined in the data dictionary.

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