Chapter 6

Managing Data Integrity

Data integrity controls help to guarantee the accuracy, validity, and correctness of data stored in a database. Data integrity controls can be thought of as rules regarding what is considered to be valid data. Data integrity can be enforced using stored procedures, or it can even be enforced outside of SQL Server in the calling application.

However, data integrity is mainly enforced by constraints and triggers. Constraints are additional rules applied to a table that determine valid data. They are automatically enforced by the database engine.

Triggers are special stored procedures that execute in response to events on the server. Data Manipulation Language (DML) triggers can respond to, or execute instead of ...

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