Problems underlying the use of referential integrity mechanisms in relational database management systems

Referential integrity is used in relational data-bases for expressing existence dependencies between tuples. Relational database management systems (RDBMS) provide diverse referential integrity capabilities. Thus, is some RDBMSs referential integrity constraints can be specified non-procedurally (declaratively), while in other RDBMSs they must be specified procedurally. Moreover, some RDBMSs restrict the class of allowed referential integrity constraints. We examine in this paper the main problems underlying the use of referential integrity mechanisms in three representative RDBMSs, DB2, SYBASE, and INGRES. 11 refs.