referential integrity
The technique of maintaining data always in a consistent format, part of the ACID philosophy. In particular, data in different tables is kept consistent through the use of foreign key constraints, which can prevent changes from happening or automatically propagate those changes to all related tables. Related mechanisms include the unique constraint, which prevents duplicate values from being inserted by mistake, and the NOT NULL constraint, which prevents blank values from being inserted by mistake.
See also ACID.
See also FOREIGN KEY constraint.
See also NOT NULL constraint.
See also unique constraint.