We challenge you to certify your updates

Correctness of data residing in a database is vital. While integrity constraint enforcement can often ensure data consistency, it is inadequate to protect against updates that involve careless, unintentional errors, e.g., whether a specified update to an employee’s record was for the intended employee. We propose a novel approach that is complementary to existing integrity enforcement techniques, to guard against such erroneous updates. Our approach is based on (a) updaters providing an update certificate with each database update, and (b) the database system verifying the correctness of the update certificate provided before performing the update. We formalize a certificate as a (challenge, response) pair, and characterize good certificates as those that are easy for updaters to provide and, when correct, give the system enough confidence that the update was indeed intended. We present algorithms that efficiently enumerate good challenges, without exhaustively exploring the ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Su Chen, Xin Luna Dong, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Divesh Srivastava
• Keywords: Database, Integrity Constraint, Natural Models, Parameter Settings, SIGMOD 2011