[unclebucknasty]

>I've come around to the idea that the database is a better thing to put at the centre

I've seen systems that take this to the extreme of not allowing a single piece of logic into the domain. Domain objects were essentially data containers only. So, if you had a Person object with firstName and lastName properties that represented those DB columns, then even a getFullName() that concatenated the two was verboten.

Instead, all logic had to be in a service. This led to lots of duplication and a super-massive service layer in a system that was decidedly procedural, even if it was implemented in an OO-language.