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Imagine this… I have a field in the database titled ‘current_round’. This may only be in the range of 0,1,2,3.
Through the application logic, it is impossible to get a number above 3 or less than 0 into the database.
Should there be error checking in place to see if the value is malformed (i.e. not in the range 0-3)? Or is this just unnecessary overhead? Is it OK to assume values in a database are correctly formatted/ranged etc (assuming you sanatise/evaluate correctly all user input?)
I generally don’t validate all data from the database. Instead I try to enforce constraints on the database. In your case depending on the meaning of 0, 1, 2, 3 I might use a lookup table with a foreign key constraint or if they are just numeric values I might use a check constraint (differs from DB vendor to the next).
This helps protect against changes made to the DB by someone with direct access and/or future applications that may use the same DB but not share your input validation process.