This is perhaps what you were hinting at when you said “wouldn’t be ideal”, but Active Record validations on their own are subject to race conditions with concurrent requests. The only truly safe way to ensure integrity of your data is to enforce validations/constraints at the database level.

IME you usually want _both_ the Active Record validations, and the database-level validations, because you get better error messages from the former, and the latter is just a safeguard.