Summary
An update is available that adds support for self-referential constraints in the new Referential Integrity Operator in SQL Server 2016.
More Information
This update is included in Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2016.
Note SQL Server 2016 introduced a new Referential Integrity Operator (under compatibility level 130) that increases the limit on the number of other tables with foreign key references to a primary or unique key of a particular table (incoming references) from 253 to 10,000. This new query execution operator performs the referential integrity checks in-place by comparing the changed row to the rows in the referencing tables. It does this to verify that the modification will not break the referential integrity. This results in much shorter compilation times for such plans while maintaining comparable execution times. After you apply this update, the new Referential Integrity Operator also supports self-referential constraints.
Each new build for SQL Server 2016 contains all the hotfixes and all the security fixes that were included with the previous build. We recommend that you install the latest build for SQL Server 2016.
References
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