Checking data quality with constraints
By effectively using the preceding constraints, you can significantly enhance the quality of data in your database. Constraints act as a first line of defense against data entry errors, ensuring consistency, validity, and integrity of the data stored.
Checking and ensuring data quality is a crucial aspect of database management, and using constraints is one of the most effective ways to achieve this. Constraints enforce rules at the database level, ensuring that only valid data is entered into the database.
Applications can implement complex validation logic that might be impractical at the database level. This includes multi-field validations, conditional validations, and checks that involve external data sources. So, there’s a trade-off in checking the validity of the data without even hitting the database. This includes ensuring the data is in the correct format, social security numbers are acceptable, and so on. It is easier to...
