> This strikes me as a unnecessary all-or-nothing argument

I completely understand why it comes across that way. HN Comment length is limited and the current practice is a comfy local optimum, so any one change away from it is going to feel bad, and it's hard to get across my full theory of database design in comment form. I would not recommend most existing teams simply stop using foreign keys, unless they also adapted a lot of other changes that coexist with it. Still, there is a better world for database design, and that world probably does not use foreign key constraints.

> I would agree that you shouldn't put all your business logic in the database but that doesn't mean you shouldn't put any business logic in your database.

I actually would (lightly) argue that does mean you shouldn't put any business logic in your database, as I find that highly coherent design philosophy leads to highly coherent code. The most important question to me is about how the system can handle change over time. Foreign keys are one part of a larger set of "design principles" that everyone seems to take for granted that lead to a system that cannot handle change.

> If foreign key constraints are business logic then so are table definitions and column types.

I disagree on this one. Table definitions and column types are a "level below" business logic, as evidenced by the fact that you could probably refactor a lot of schemas for better/different performance characteristics without changing any of the actual business logic that drive them. The business logic doesn't (shouldn't) care whether you've used a bitfield or a bunch of boolean columns or a child set-inclusion table to represent a bunch of yes/no facts about some entity. They're "persistence logic", and the database is exactly the right place for that.

> My advice is to ensure, as best as possible, that invalid states are impossible to represent.

The problem is that an "invalid state" is highly dependent on your perspective. A state that is invalid to use in one part of your codebase is perfectly valid in other parts. The ubiquity of "draft", "draft final", and "final" shows that humans want to represent "invalid states" all the time! Aren't you glad your IDE lets you represent invalid code? Okay, fine, that data is not ready for the annual submittal, but does that mean I'm really not allowed to save it at all?

And these "invalid states" are extremely volatile as your focus expands around your domain. All contact info must have a primary contact method -- well, unless they're just "contact stubs". All facilities need a facility manager -- well, unless they're 3rd party facilities, or storage facilities, or in Region 9, or start with the letter 'P'.

Haven't you been 300 hours into the development of a system when suddenly someone springs on you, "Oh yeah, Bob has two bosses. Why should that be a problem?" And you're screaming internally, "Of course it's a problem! You assured me six months ago that everyone only has one supervisor, and now you're telling me this one guy has two!? This changes EVERYTHING!"

But why? Why does it change everything? Why does every little change to our database schemas always seem to propagate to the entire system? It's because we're designing databases wrong. And foreign keys are a (small) part of that wrongness.