Database integrity ensures accurate, consistent, and error-free data. Entity, domain, and referential integrity are the three constraints. Normalization and error checking are also used. Administrators must verify integrity before adding, modifying, or deleting information to prevent errors and confusion.
Database integrity is the practice of ensuring that data stored in a database is accurate, consistent, and error-free. The slightest spelling mistake or repetition of information can cause massive problems in a database, so database integrity is taken seriously. The three advocates of integrity are entity integrity, domain integrity, and referential integrity. Along with these three, normalization and error checking are applied to further ensure integrity. Most of these processes are automated, but administrators also often check manually to ensure that no errors occur in the database.
When an administrator wants to add, modify or delete information from the database, it is first necessary to verify its integrity. Including or changing any information can be disastrous, because the data can have far-reaching effects on other tables and sections of the database. To reduce the possibility of this, and to keep information already in the database accurate, the integrity is always checked before changes can be made.
Entity integrity is the first constraint on database integrity. This checks the table the admin wants to work with and looks at the row names. If rows in the same table have the same name, redundant information is created, which creates confusion in the database.
Next comes domain integrity. This checks the type of data added consistently to the table or section and ensures that new data conforms to that data type. For example, if the table is specified to contain only dates and someone tries to insert a word, the domain integrity process will alert the administrator of a consistency error. This is because the table is only meant to handle dates, so having a word will screw up smooth processing and could cause errors in the future.
The third constraint in database integrity is referential integrity. Tables in a database are rarely alone: other tables often reference them and reference other tables. If the administrator commands one table to reference another, but the second table is incorrect or does not exist, this causes processing errors. Referential integrity checks to ensure that all references are valid.
In addition to these three integrity issues, normalization and error checking rules are also applied for true database integrity. Normalization looks for redundant information and unnecessarily long tables, eliminating the redundancy and transforming the long tables into several short tables, respectively. Error checking scans the database for other potential errors and ensures that all data is valid.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
