I am sorry if you believe that the article implies that. It wasn't intended to. I am not asking you to buy into anything and I too have cleaned out more databases then I would like to recall because of a lack of referential integrity.

What I am saying is that the database can not and should not decide what is valid data. What is valid data one day may not be the next depending on the needs or wants of the application. Once the application decides what is valid, then yes, the database should be used as a tool to help maintain the integrity of the data.