[SkyMarshal]

I was going to post the exact same thing. I started in '99 and am shocked, shocked to see this is still an ongoing issue. I thought by now most devs had at least read a little Codd, Date, and/or Pascal.

Maybe it comes from having started building web and db apps for large enterprises where the DB was the nucleus of the operation and the apps the satellites. It seems among the web crowd it's the opposite - the app is the nucleus, with the DB and presentation layer the satellites, resulting in ORM among other things.

In those enterprises, access to the DB's was strictly controlled by the DBA team and data made available to apps via stored procs only. The app devs would request a stored proc with certain parameters that would return a certain dataset, and the DBA team would implement it and grant access to that app only (or grant access to an already-existing sp that did the same thing).

The idea of ORM still bugs me for that reason, even though I use it anyway. I can't help but suspect it's the formalization of a convenient but bad practice. I could be wrong about that though, biased as I am in this regard.

[jacques_chester]

> It seems among the web crowd it's the opposite - the app is the nucleus, with the DB and presentation layer the satellites, resulting in ORM among other things.

Indeed, this is one of the strongly-held "opinions" of Ruby on Rails. The database is more or less treated with contempt, a mere bitbucket.