frogcoder

Usually our monthly fee won't exceed 1,000 dollars. We discovered last month's bill is almost 3,000, and for this month up till now it's already over 200,000.

We collected the evidences and filed police report. The bill is paid through a distributor, anything we ask about the reduction of payment, the distributor just passes it on to Microsoft. I feel if we don't find a way to talk to Microsoft, we will just end up paying the whole thing.

Many of you might think we screwed up, we pay up, but I think it's more like a stolen credit card situation, we can negotiate with the bank. How do I go about this?

I use foreign keys quite often in my schemas because of data integrity, while my colleague has a no FK policy. His main argument is difficulties during data migrations which he frequently encounters. He rather have a smooth data migration process than having an unexpected error and abort the whole operation that the migration is only a small part of. I suspect the errors might be mainly caused by not considering data integrity at all at the first place, but I can feel his pain. To be fair, as far as I know, he never had major data problems.

He is not the only one I've met who insisted on not having FK. I've even seen large systems prohibit using JOIN statements.

Personally, I see the data integrity out weights the inconveniences, do you use FK for your systems, what are your experiences?