Referential Integrity

• Referential integrity is a mechanism that enforces the ties between data in separate tables and prevents them from being broken

• Referential integrity minimizes the undesirable likelihood of the existence of a record in the child table for which there is no corresponding record in the parent table - referred to as an orphan (or dangling) record

• Prior to setting referential integrity, ensure that

  • the field used to tie two tables together (the link field) must be a primary key field in the parent table and a foreign key in the child table
  • the link fields have an identical data type
  • the two tables are in the same database container

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