This guy's experience was almost entirely with front-end technology (pretty much just JSP's actually), and it showed in almost every engineering decision he made. The sad thing is that, there is an argument to be made for denormalizing data and not using foreign keys. That argument is not "they don't buy you anything."
I worked in a bank for a minute or three. Big one. The production databases ran without foreign key constraints enabled for performance. In the development environment, however, all constraints were strictly enforced.
