The DB is the Foundation

I am surprised how little understood is still nowadays the importance of having clean, validated data in a DB.

DB schemas devoid of any NULL check, referential constraints and range checks are still commonplace, and management shuns attempts to enforce rigor perceiving it as "lack of flexibility". How flexible it is to have a "status" spelled in 5 different ways, or a date field represented as String and expressed in 10 different formats, or a boolean value expressed sometimes as True/False, other times as 0/1 and other times as YES/NO, I have no clue.

The DB is like the feet of your company, if feet are unstable, then your knees, your back, even your neck will start hurting and degenerating and making your life utterly miserable.

Statements like "we do all our validation in the front end" are ludicrous, ad history tell that Operations will make sure that a lot of DB changes will happen through custom scripts, independent UIs and even manually.

There are many analogies to DB constraints: control entropy (Physics), anti-cancerous cells (Biology), closed loop feedback (Control Systems), Secret Services (Fascist state - well all States are fascists inherently, so calling Fascist a State is a tautology)....