[BenjieGillam]

Completely agree; the issue I see with people who try putting logic in the DB ultimately to reject it is they try and bring their procedural programming paradigms (e.g. “for” loops and “if” statements) into the DB and that’s incredibly inefficient, requiring row-by-row looped fetches and ultimately causing their systems to grind to a halt and them to blame the concept of putting logic in the DB. If instead they were to embrace the declarative nature of the database and used efficient patterns such as statement triggers rather than row triggers, common table expressions (CTEs) rather than row-by-row looped processing, set-returning functions and joins rather than row-by-row function calls, etc then they would find that their code is both more expressive and often thousands of times more performant. As you say, embracing this model means less data transferred between cluster and client which can result in reduced load across the entire system without increasing complexity or having to worry about cache invalidation issues. And time spent learning databases is knowledge that will still be useful in a decade or two, it’s well worth investing into.

[gregjor]

I completely agree with you. I think of relational databases as a fundamental programming skill. I have made a good career from RDBMS and SQL expertise, and that technology shows no signs of going away.