Referential Integrity is a set of constraints applied to foreign keys which prevents entering a row in the child table (where you have the foreign key) for which you don't have any corresponding row in the parent table i.e. entering NULL or invalid foreign keys. Referential Integrity prevents your table from having incorrect or incomplete relationships e.g. If you have two tables Order and Customer where Customer is parent table with primary key customer_id and Order is child table with foreign key customer_id. Since as per business rules you can not have an Order without a Customer and this business rule can be implemented using referential integrity in SQL on a relational database.