Data integrity refers to maintaining and assuring the accuracy and consistency of data over its entire life-cycle, and is a critical aspect to the design, implementation and usage of any system which stores, processes, or retrieves data.
Data with “integrity” is said to have a complete or whole structure. Data values are standardized according to a data model and/or data type. All characteristics of the data must be correct – including business rules, relations, dates, definitions and lineage – for data to be complete. Data integrity is imposed within a database when it is designed and is authenticated through the ongoing use of error checking and validation routines. As a simple example, to maintain data integrity numeric columns/cells should not accept alphabetic data.
