A database management system for determining consistency in a hierarchical database sequentially reads pointers of a plurality of segment data, generates an address hash value, which is a hash value of retention addresses of the segment data having been read, generates a pointer hash value, which is a hash value of the pointers included in the segment data having been read, corrects the address hash value, when the contents of the address already read is updated, based a retention address of segment data added or deleted by the update, corrects the pointer hash value based on each pointer changed by the update, and determines that the hierarchical database is consistent if the corrected address hash value coincides with the corrected pointer hash value.