Validating Models

It is important to maintain consistency and integrity within databases. Databases often use some form of constraint stipulation to ensure consistency. Typically, these constraints consist of checking for a range of values, such as minimum string length, uniqueness, or existence. Integrity for databases involves managing the associations and relations between symbiotic records. This involves cascading updates and deletions of referenced records (for example, setting the associated identity columns to NULL when the referenced record has been deleted). Consistency and integrity are not mutually exclusive to one another, but the two patterns help to ensure organization.

Note

The term consistency refers to ensuring that only valid data will be written and read from the database (especially within the context of accessing data concurrently). Integrity refers to data that conforms to a set of rules, constraints, or triggers before it is inserted or read.

While...