Silly example, who decides what is 'an extremely large number of records'? Whoever has a view about this should monitor and police the limit. If you are saying

Silly example, who decides what is 'an extremely large number of records'? Whoever has a view about this should monitor and police the limit. If you are saying that you can't protect against every eventuality so you may as well guard against none, then that is asinine. Applications should enforce correct application behaviour regardless of user behaviour. Databases should maintain database integrity regardless of application bahaviour. If this requires duplicated effort then so be it.