[alunny]

The core of Node has very few functions that perform I/O, but there's no reason you can't use I/O in your own programs (in the original link, the network stream is read and written out, and also the blacklist file is read, synchronously). The readFileSync call is an anomaly in Node - typically you use evented I/O - open a stream and set listeners/callbacks for particular events.

There are modules developed for most of the major open source databases (I'm not sure what the status of the async MySQL driver is, but there's definitely something you can use).