Ahh to fkey or not to fkey. The problem with doing referential integrity in the app is what happens if a change is made to the database outside of the app? I g

Ahh to fkey or not to fkey. The problem with doing referential integrity in the app is what happens if a change is made to the database outside of the app? I guess it depends. If you’re at the scale where you can’t refactor your database to keep up and you, after profiling or some other method, have proven that moving integrity enforcement into the model of your app is faster then by all means do that. That being said: foreign keys help the query optimizer make better decisions. If you’re using and ORM though that doesn’t matter as you’ll get generic queries and you’re likely not profiling your queries anyway. They also are a way of self documenting the relationship between things. If you’re going to get rid of foreign keys then why not denormalize so that the data is easier to query and less likely to get corrupted? Reduce the number of tables say into a single table a-la the DynamoDB approach