From: Naz Gassiep
Date: May 24 2007 3:33pm
Subject: Integrity on large sites
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I'm working in a project at the moment that is using MySQL, and people keep making assertions like this one:

"*Really* big sites don't ever have referential integrity. Or if the few spots they do (like with financial transactions) it's implemented on the application level (via, say, optimistic locking), never the database level."

A large DB working with no RI would give me nightmares. Is it really true that large sites turn RI off to improve performance? Am I just being naive in thinking that everyone runs their DBs with RI in production?