Semantic Integrity Considerations for Effective Data Management: Important Issues for the Database Course

Semantic integrity constraints are time invariant properties of the world of interest being represented by a database. They constrain the values that may appear in a valid database instance. Despite their crucial role in data modeling, support for them has been largely ignored by database management system (DBMS) vendors. As a result, in most database applications today, either integrity constraints are not enforced resulting in database instances that are not reflections of reality, or precious programmer time is spent in specifying and enforcing integrity constraints as application program logic. Neither of the two situations are acceptable. This article calls for a more systematic coverage of semantic integrity constraints in the database course with the intent of training informed users who can voice their discontent and put pressure on the DBMS vendors to correct the current direction.