ENHANCING DATABASE RELIABILITY THROUGH PARTIAL REFERENTIAL INTEGRITY ENFORCEMENT

Abstract

A lack of Referential Integrity in a database can lead Relational Databases to return incomplete data, usually with no indication of an error thus it results in records been lost in the database because they are not returned in queries or reports but the presence of Referential Integrity checks prevents orphan table that no longer has a relationship with its parent table by deleting the orphan row, updating the cells or preventing the action from be performed. However, Simple Referential Integrity cannot check for multiple referential relationships as such this research aims at developing a module that will enforce Partial Referential Integrity checks for MySQL database. The Structured System Analysis and Design Methodology (SSADM) was used in the design and implemented with Java programming language. Meanwhile the tools used for this research are Stored Procedures which encapsulates sets of operations or queries to execute on the database server which is supported by most Relational database systems. Furthermore, MySQL Workbench which is a Graphical User Interface based tool was used to run the queries. Therefore the module will reject or validate data that passes the partial referential integrity check and a database was used to test the module hence the results show that the execution time of the system without the module is less than the execution time of the system with the module because the module ensures that data queried are valid and also, the integrity of the system that uses the module shows that the data in the system meets all constraints enforced and the work done by the database server is minimized