Using Referential Integrity for Control in a Complex Database There is nothing that Referential Integrity (RI) provides that can’t be done with application code. However, the benefits of using RI in your database design can have a significant impact on your ability to control your database, enforce consistency, improve system performance and programmer productivity. RI allows you to define and enforce one or more relationships between a pair of files (parent and dependent), and do so at the system or database level without having to code enforcement in each program that accesses the files. This session will review referential integrity concepts and show how it can be implemented and managed in DB2 UDB.