[forinti]

> No foreign keys, many things were done in the code itself (filtering, sorting, etc, to make sure the DB only ever uses the most efficient indexes)

This normally is terrible advice. You have to be sure that you really need it. Too often I see developers do this needlessly.

[ikonic89]

Yeah, I can agree with that. You really need to know what you're doing. We have benchmarks for most of such "micro-optimizations", though now we can know how things are going to behave before we even make them, just from the experience.

Definitely not something I'd suggest on an average traffic website.