I think many developers want to treat RDBMSs as simple black-box data stores... something, admittedly, you can largely get away with in the majority of applicat

I think many developers want to treat RDBMSs as simple black-box data stores... something, admittedly, you can largely get away with in the majority of applications. I think this leads to a lot of developers avoiding anything that forces a real understanding of the database since they can get a fair amount done without it and that's understandable. Triggers and stored procedures and database functions intrude into this solace and therefore are frowned upon by many. Having said all that I think it's better to have a firm understanding and a feel for RDBMS operations and development techniques and that you can produce more solid work if you have that understanding. I think if you have that understanding (and actually have an appropriate problem for a RDBMS solution) there are roles for triggers/procedures/functions in the database... just understand where the boundaries are and delineate clear responsibilities to the various pieces of the stack (that's the hard part and the part in which many fail). I also think that if you are a developer needing to make use of an RDBMS and don't have a solid understanding of your RDBMS of choice, you're going to screw up more than just anything to do with triggers/functions/procedures/etc. This is why I always approach projects where ORMs are important with caution. ORMs are just a tool, true, but often times they are also the rug under which the database can be swept... or to put it another way, a framework for building technical debt. (Yeah, yeah, not always, but frequently). As for PostgreSQL table inheritance... just say no. You cannot overcome the object/relational impedance with that feature and you end up compromising too much of why you might want a RDBMS in the first place. I've only seen it used well twice; one of those cases being table partitioning and that is, from a user perspective, becoming much less necessary with new features in PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is an Object Relational Database Management System, but I think you have to consider the object part of that as primarily being useful inside the database itself: it can be useful in more sophisticated uses of the database itself, especially if you are writing functions/triggers, but isn't a great tool in my experience to map to OO systems outside of the database. I have found it much clearer from an information architectural perspective and easier to maintain data integrity using standard RDBMS modeling techniques (with the exception of maintaining certain unstructured data as JSON blobs).