Safe Referential Integrity Structures in Relational Databases
Victor M Markowitz · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 1991
Referential integrity constraints express in relational databases existence dependencies between tuples.Although it is known that certain referential integrity structures may cause data manipulation problems, the nature of these problems has not been explored and the conditions for avoiding them have not been formally developed.In this paper we examine these data manipulation problems and formally develop safeness conditions for avoiding them.Next, we discuss the problem of specifying safe referential integrity constraints in lhree representative relational database management systems, ffiM's DB2, SYBASE, and INGRES.