Salesforce Certified Data Architecture Practice Test

A master-detail relationship enforces tighter data integrity by establishing a strong association between the parent and child objects. In this type of relationship, the child object's lifecycle is directly tied to the parent object; if the parent is deleted, the child is also deleted. This cascading behavior ensures that data integrity is maintained since any child records cannot exist without a corresponding parent record.

Additionally, with master-detail relationships, certain rules such as sharing settings and ownership are inherited from the parent object to the child object, further ensuring data consistency and a structured hierarchy.

In contrast, a lookup relationship allows for more flexibility, as it does not require that the related records be tightly connected; the child can exist without a parent, offering less enforcement of data integrity. This distinction is critical when designing data models and understanding how relationships will affect data management and security in Salesforce.