Validation and Data Integrity
What must remain true about the business record when people edit, archive, export, or restore it? Enforce critical invariants at the strongest reliable boundary, including the database where appropriate.
What You Will Be Able to Decide
- Explain validation and data integrity in product and business terms.
- Apply this decision: Enforce critical invariants at the strongest reliable boundary, including the database where appropriate.
- Recognise this material risk: different clients accept impossible or contradictory states into permanent storage.
- Use this review: Use one CRM contact and its related opportunity to test missing values, duplicate records, deletion, and restore.
A founder is deciding how the product should remember information and preserve its meaning over time. This lesson gives you a concrete question to take into a build brief, proposal review, or product decision.
What must remain true about the business record when people edit, archive, export, or restore it? The course example is A lightweight CRM for a two-person sales team; use it to decide what evidence would justify the choice before a builder implements it.
What Does Validation and Data Integrity Mean for Your Product?
A founder is deciding how the product should remember information and preserve its meaning over time.
Use the illustrative service for this course (A lightweight CRM for a two-person sales team) to make the choice concrete. What must remain true about the business record when people edit, archive, export, or restore it?
Technical term
Validation and Data Integrity
Validation rejects unacceptable input, while data integrity means stored information remains accurate, consistent, and related according to product rules.
How Should a Founder Use Validation and Data Integrity?
For a lightweight crm for a two-person sales team, ask what would happen if different clients accept impossible or contradictory states into permanent storage.
For this decision, the useful standard is that the data model can represent the real business rules without ambiguity or silent corruption.
- Decision: Enforce critical invariants at the strongest reliable boundary, including the database where appropriate.
- Evidence to request: show that the data model can represent the real business rules without ambiguity or silent corruption.
- Owner: name who will respond if different clients accept impossible or contradictory states into permanent storage.
- Record the result in the data model and recovery plan.
- Practical review: Use one CRM contact and its related opportunity to test missing values, duplicate records, deletion, and restore.
How Do You Choose an Approach to Validation and Data Integrity?
What must remain true about the business record when people edit, archive, export, or restore it? Enforce critical invariants at the strongest reliable boundary, including the database where appropriate.
The risk is that different clients accept impossible or contradictory states into permanent storage. Compare a simpler option with the proposed one, including who will operate either choice.
- Describe the user or business outcome that must be protected.
- Identify the most credible failure and its consequence.
- Compare the simplest adequate approach with one realistic alternative.
- Set a review point for when the decision may need to change.
What Evidence Should You Accept for Validation and Data Integrity?
What Warning Signs Should You Look For?
- The proposal does not address this risk: different clients accept impossible or contradictory states into permanent storage.
- Nobody can show whether the data model can represent the real business rules without ambiguity or silent corruption.
- The decision has no named owner or review point.
What Should You Ask a Consultant?
- What changes for the user if we choose this approach to validation and data integrity?
- How have we reduced or accepted this risk: different clients accept impossible or contradictory states into permanent storage.
- Can you demonstrate that the data model can represent the real business rules without ambiguity or silent corruption?
- Who owns the result, and when will we reconsider it?
Key takeaway
Key Takeaway
Enforce critical invariants at the strongest reliable boundary, including the database where appropriate. Ask for evidence against the specific risk: different clients accept impossible or contradictory states into permanent storage.