Question

Can a Check Constraint (or some other technique) be used to prevent a value from being set that contradicts its prior value when its record is updated.

One example would be a NULL timestamp indicating something happened, like “file_exported”. Once a file has been exported and has a non-NULL value, it should never be set to NULL again.

Another example would be a hit counter, where an integer is only permitted to increase, but can never decrease.

If it helps I’m using postgresql, but I’d like to see solutions that fit any SQL implementation

Answer 1

One example would be a NULL timestamp indicating something happened,
like “file_exported”. Once a file has been exported and has a non-NULL
value, it should never be set to NULL again.

Another example would be a hit counter, where an integer is only
permitted to increase, but can never decrease.

In both of these cases, I simply wouldn’t record these changes as attributes on the annotated table; the ‘exported’ or ‘hit count’ is a distinct idea, representing related but orthogonal real world notions from the objects they relate to:

So they would simply be different relations. Since We only want “file_exported” to occur once:

CREATE TABLE thing_file_exported(
    thing_id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY REFERENCES(thing.id),
    file_name VARCHAR NOT NULL
)

The hit counter is similarly a different table:

CREATE TABLE thing_hits(
    thing_id INTEGER NOT NULL REFERENCES(thing.id),
    hit_date TIMESTAMP NOT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (thing_id, hit_date)
)

And you might query with

SELECT thing.col1, thing.col2, tfe.file_name, count(th.thing_id)
FROM thing 
LEFT OUTER JOIN thing_file_exported tfe
    ON (thing.id = tfe.thing_id)
LEFT OUTER JOIN thing_hits th
    ON (thing.id = th.thing_id)
GROUP BY thing.col1, thing.col2, tfe.file_name