And it’s not just who you trust, it’s also at what layer you want to enforce your integrity and consistency. Not letting the db do that means that every part of

And it’s not just who you trust, it’s also at what layer you want to enforce your integrity and consistency. Not letting the db do that means that every part of the application that touches the database needs to do that enforcement. Even if you abstract that away into a strict layer directly above the database—which essentially means you’ve just implemented parts of a database on top of a database—you have to essentially invent and implement the methods and languages to do so yourself. At which point you’re pretty much guaranteed to be much worse of then if you had just let the DB do it. This might mean handling unexpected errors if you have a bug in your application logic, but that’s usually orders of magnitude better than introducing hard to fight inconsistencies.