Whats referential integrity?

Referential integrity is a relational database concept in which multiple tables share a relationship
based on the data stored in the tables, and that relationship must remain consistent.
The concept of referential integrity, and one way in which its enforced, is best illustrated by an
example. Suppose company X has 2 tables, an Employee table, and an Employee Salary table. In
the Employee table we have 2 columns the employee ID and the employee name. In the Employee
Salary table, we have 2 columns the employee ID and the salary for the given ID.

Now, suppose we wanted to remove an employee because he no longer works at company X. Then,
we would remove his entry in the Employee table. Because he also exists in the Employee Salary
table, we would also have to manually remove him from there also. Manually removing the employee
from the Employee Salary table can become quite a pain. And if there are other tables in which
Company X uses that employee then he would have to be deleted from those tables as well an
even bigger pain.
By enforcing referential integrity, we can solve that problem, so that we wouldnt have to manually
delete him from the Employee Salary table (or any others). Heres how: first we would define the
employee ID column in the Employee table to be our primary key. Then, we would define the
employee ID column in the Employee Salary table to be a foreign key that points to a primary key
that is the employee ID column in the Employee table. Once we define our foreign to primary key
relationship, we would need to add whats called a constraint to the Employee Salary table. The
constraint that we would add in particular is called a cascading delete this would mean that any
time an employee is removed from the Employee table, any entries that employee has in the
Employee Salary table would alsoautomatically be removed from the Employee Salary table.
Note in the example given above that referential integrity is something that must beenforced, and
that we enforced only one rule of referential integrity (the cascading delete). There are actually 3
rules that referential integrity enforces:

1.We may not add a record to the Employee Salary table

unless the foreign key for that record points to an existing
employee in the Employee table.
2.If a record in the Employee table is deleted, all corresponding
records in the Employee Salary table must be deleted using a
cascading delete. This was the example we had given earlier.
3.If the primary key for a record in the Employee table changes,
all corresponding records in the Employee Salary table must be
modified using what's called a cascading update.

Its worth noting that most RDBMSs relational databases like Oracle, DB2, Teradata, etc. can
automatically enforce referential integrity if the right settings are in place. But, a large part of the
burden of maintaining referential integrity is placed upon whoever designs the database schema
basically whoever defined the tables and their corresponding structure/relationships in the database

that you are using. Referential integrity is an important concept and you simply must know it for
any programmer interview.