Over the past few years, reversible watermarking techniques for relational databases have been proposed to provide protection of ownership rights, data tempering, and data integrity. Mainly, these techniques ensure original data recovery from watermarked data, whereas irreversible watermarking schemes only protect ownership rights. This characteristic of reversible watermarking has emerged as a candidate solution for the protection of ownership rights of data, intolerable to modifications such as medical data, genetic data, credit card, and bank account data. The main objective of this paper is to make an extensive survey of the state-of-the-art in reversible watermarking techniques for relational databases to reflect recent research progress and to point out the key issues for future research. In order to analyze these techniques, a classification has been performed on the basis of (i) the extent of modifications introduced by the watermarking scheme in the underlying data and (ii) the robustness of the embedded watermark against malicious attacks. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.