Joe Celko defends the honor of the check constraint:
The problem is that newer SQL programmers (and even some more experienced ones) don’t take advantage of these constraints. Consider this slight rewrite of an actual posting on an SQL forum. In the original, the poster thought that identifiers should be integers and that ISO–11179 naming rules do not apply, so I cleaned it up a little, but this will make my point.
Click through to learn more about check constraints.