[whizzter]

sharded setup with a bit fast and loose foreign key management, so very good for performance but not a drop-in replacement if you rely on your foreign keys to be constrained/checked by the database.

[sgarland]

So perfect for most web dev companies, then.

“We handle FKs in the app for flexibility.”

“And how many orphaned rows do you have?”

“…”

[rcrowley]

The question isn't how many orphaned rows do you have, it's whether it matters. Databases are wonderful but they cannot maintain every invariant and they cannot express a whole application. They're one tool in the belt.

[sgarland]

> cannot express a whole application

Not with that attitude: https://docs.postgrest.org/en/v13/index.html

Orphaned rows can very much matter for data privacy concerns, which is also where I most frequently see this approach failing.

[jashmatthews]

Most companies can afford not to give a shit until they hit SOC2 or GDPR compliance and then suddenly orphaned data is a giant liability.