On repairing referential integrity constraints in relational databases

Abstract

Integrity constraints (ICs) are semantic conditions that a database should satisfy in order to be in a consistent state. Typically, ICs are declared with the database schema and enforced by the database management system (DBMS). However, in practice, ICs may not be specified to the DBMS along with the schema, this is considered a bad database design and may lead to many problems such as inconsistency and anomalies. In this paper, we present a method to identify and repair missing referential integrity constraints (foreign keys). Our method comprises three steps of verification of candidate foreign keys: data-based, model-based, and brute-force.