# Foreign Key Validator

Validate foreign key relationships between multiple datasets. Perfect for checking data integrity, finding orphaned records, and ensuring referential consistency across related tables.

Features:
- Validate foreign key relationships
- Find orphaned records
- Check referential integrity
- Support multiple key formats
- Cross-table validation
- Missing key detection
- Duplicate key analysis
- Relationship mapping

Common Use Cases:
- Database integrity checks
- Data migration validation
- ETL process verification
- Referential consistency checks
- Data quality assurance
- Relationship analysis

> Canonical page: https://elysiatools.com/en/tools/data-foreign-key-validator

- **Category:** Data Processing

- **Keywords:** foreign key, validation, data integrity, relationships, database, orphaned, referential

## Overview

The Foreign Key Validator is a specialized utility designed to ensure referential integrity by comparing primary and foreign key relationships across datasets. It helps identify missing keys, orphaned records, and inconsistencies, ensuring your relational data remains accurate and reliable during migrations or routine audits.

## Inputs

- **Primary Key Data** (textarea): Paste primary key data (parent table)... Example: ID,Name,City 1,New York,USA 2,Los Angeles,USA
- **Primary Key Column** (number): Column number that contains the primary key values (1-based index)
- **Foreign Key Data** (textarea): Paste foreign key data (child table)... Example: ID,Name,CityID John,1,1 Jane,2,2
- **Foreign Key Column** (number): Column number that contains the foreign key values (1-based index)
- **Validation Mode** (select)
- **Case Sensitive** (checkbox): Treat uppercase and lowercase as different values
- **Ignore Empty Values** (checkbox): Skip empty or null values during validation
- **Output Format** (select)

## When to use

- Verifying data integrity before or after a database migration.
- Identifying orphaned records in child tables that lack a corresponding parent entry.
- Performing cross-table consistency checks to ensure relational mapping is accurate.

## How it works

- Paste your parent table data into the Primary Key Data field and specify the column index containing the primary keys.
- Paste your child table data into the Foreign Key Data field and specify the column index containing the foreign keys.
- Select your preferred validation mode and output format, then run the tool to generate a detailed report of matches and discrepancies.

## Use cases

- Database integrity checks to ensure all child records point to valid parent entities.
- ETL process verification to confirm data mapping remains intact during transformation.
- Data quality assurance for cleaning up legacy datasets with broken relationships.

## Frequently asked questions

### What is an orphaned record?

An orphaned record is a row in a child table that references a primary key value that does not exist in the parent table.

### Can I validate data that is case-sensitive?

Yes, you can toggle the 'Case Sensitive' option to ensure that 'ID-01' and 'id-01' are treated as distinct values.

### How do I handle empty cells in my data?

Enable the 'Ignore Empty Values' checkbox to skip null or empty fields during the validation process.

### What output formats are supported?

The tool supports Detailed Reports, Summary views, JSON format, and CSV exports for invalid records.

### Is there a limit to the number of rows I can validate?

The tool is designed for efficient processing, but performance depends on your browser's memory capacity for very large datasets.

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## Samples

- [Android Image Processing Java Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/android-image-processing-java): Android Java image processing examples including reading/saving images, scaling, and format conversion
- [Android Image Processing Kotlin Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/android-image-processing-kotlin): Android Kotlin image processing examples including reading/saving images, scaling, and format conversion
- [Web Image Processing Python Samples](https://elysiatools.com/en/samples/web-image-processing-python): Web Python image processing examples using PIL/Pillow including reading, saving, resizing, and format conversion
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