>FWIW, I don't think you are even a teensy bit wrong. < s> You're argument is the same as mine was...until somebody whacked me with a platypus and said...what if the back end is XML? In that case RI has absolutely no sense.
<

Not at all. The deal is that RI belongs in the DATA SERVICES TIER. In this case, we are not talking about a physcial data base. Rather, we are talking about a component that manages the raw inserts, updates, deletions, etc.

I think some of the confusion is that many folks think that RI must be enforced by a trigger mechansim, which is not true at all.