I think there's a tension between databases as programs to store and retrieve data quickly, efficiently, and reliably vs. programs to enforce business rules and domain modeling.

I am firmly in the former camp. In my opinion databases should be for storing and retrieving data as quickly and efficiently as possible. But the consensus in the database world seems to be that databases are primarily for enforcing business rules and domain models with foreign key constraints, triggers, views, transactions, type safety, domain modeling of relations, and on and on – some of which is at odds with storing and retrieving data efficiently.

That makes sense. Maybe it’s easier in an organization/ some people’s mental model to put guards around changing database because it’s separate from the code, standard across many organizations and in my opinion just harder to change.