Referential Integrity
Informally speaking, referential integrity concerns the relationship between the values in logically related tables. In the relational model, it means guaranteeing the logical consistency of the database by making sure that the values of a primary key and the foreign keys that point to it always match.
Chapter 2 explains that foreign key/primary key relationships are planned during the design of a database; they represent the logical relationships among data (although their presence in no way limits the possible access paths among the data). In considering referential integrity, the question is what the database system can do to guarantee the maintenance of matching values between foreign keys and the primary key to which ...
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