> If the database blows up on any attempts to store invalid data, I'm protected from having to ask these questions. I'm always surprised when people fight usin

> If the database blows up on any attempts to store invalid data, I'm protected from having to ask these questions. I'm always surprised when people fight using constraints. During dev, I see them as a godsend for spotting problems - I don't know how many bugs having self-enforcing data structures has caught. I will say that I have, under protest, turned them off in production once for performance. A particular heavily-used flow was annoying due to a large number of FK checks on an intermediate step. But never during development, and given the number of FK-violation errors I've seen in production code, preferably not even then. Fixing code is almost always so much easier than fixing data.