Yep, you could do that and I'm sure it will work well, just like you don't need dropbox because "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem."1
Once we signed up with Oracle Autonomous DB, we immediately could start developing and deploying web apps and web services all within the platform, without installing or integrating any other tools, and I'm not aware of another enterprise level platform where that's possible "out of the box". So, re: the original comment, that's why we chose Oracle for a reason other than supporting legacy systems. It helps us go fast, performance is great, and the on-demand licensing gets us all that without breaking the bank. There are definitely other ways to achieve the same thing (as you suggest), but I'd rather not spend my time doing any of that, just like I'd rather not roll my own dropbox, trivial though it may be.
Can you point me to a good resource on this? I work 100% in the data layer right now, but the idea of being able to create an easy frontend (assuming I learn react) would be wonderful.
Yeah, there's not one solution. There are many. Many are open source. PostgREST is amazing. The rest is up to you, but there's tons of tools out there.
Once we signed up with Oracle Autonomous DB, we immediately could start developing and deploying web apps and web services all within the platform, without installing or integrating any other tools, and I'm not aware of another enterprise level platform where that's possible "out of the box". So, re: the original comment, that's why we chose Oracle for a reason other than supporting legacy systems. It helps us go fast, performance is great, and the on-demand licensing gets us all that without breaking the bank. There are definitely other ways to achieve the same thing (as you suggest), but I'd rather not spend my time doing any of that, just like I'd rather not roll my own dropbox, trivial though it may be.
1. see "Infamous Dropbox Comment": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224