It's more than user preference in the long run; When your schema is encoded in the database (with triggers, constraints, foreign keys, the whole shebang), you c

It's more than user preference in the long run; When your schema is encoded in the database (with triggers, constraints, foreign keys, the whole shebang), you can be sure that whichever way you access the database, it is still consistent. When your schema is "in the code", even if you completely abstract it into a library, it means that the quick-one-off Ruby/Perl/C#/Python script will not have the integrity checks, and may corrupt your DB.