"*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."
Sure, but in the forum benchmark I just did, when using MyISAM, with no
reference integrity checks, at the end of the benchmark, there is an
impressive number of records with broken foreign key relations... when the
user kills his HTTP connection or reloads at the wrong moment, and the
script is interrupted, or killed by an exception or whatever, boom.
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TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
