A system and associated method for utilizing a record stored in a database. An application requests the record stored in the database to be validated. The method executes a query for retrieval and validation in a unified operation. A set of valid values for an attribute is stored in a configuration table per attribute. The query sets a null value for an attribute in the record that has an invalid value and produces a validated record. The method creates a data object with the validated record. The requester application utilized the data object having a respective value and a corresponding validity flag for each attribute.