Maintaining database correctness
Ensuring database correctness is crucial for maintaining data integrity, accuracy, and reliability. Here are some key aspects of and best practices to achieve and maintain database correctness:
- Data validation:
- Enforce data validation rules at the database level to ensure that only valid and expected data is stored
- Use constraints (e.g., NOT NULL, unique constraints) to prevent incorrect or incomplete data insertion
- Data accuracy:
- Regularly perform data quality checks and validation to identify and correct inaccuracies.
- Implement mechanisms to validate data accuracy during data entry and update processes. We covered this some in Chapter 8 when we discussed input validation and sanitization.
- Referential integrity:
- Use foreign key constraints to maintain referential integrity between related tables
- Ensure relationships between tables are well defined and data dependencies are maintained
- Normalization:
- Apply normalization techniques...
