Referential integrity and dependencies between documents in a document oriented database

Abstract

Reliability of foreign keys, which is natural in relational
databases, requires additional efforts when working with
non-relational databases, as non-relational database management
systems generally don’t support foreign key constraints due to
their distributed nature. Referential integrity is an important
property whenever documents need to refer to each other, which
is the common case. This work discusses an implementation
of a verification approach which makes use of the MapReduce
programming model, in order to detect incorrect references in
document oriented databases that may be caused by errors in
the program code or incomplete transactions. Furthermore, the
method can be applied for the verification of more complex dependencies
between documents, such that bind aggregated values
from certain sets of documents with the values of documents
referred by them.