[rombdn]

1. I disagree, on many ERP the DB is totally overloaded and the middleware is sleeping (and/or easier to scale). I think this is the kind of case where the ideal architecture paradigm has to be bent.

Your others points are really informative thanks.

[sageikosa]

I'll make a qualified concur with you. Order by and group by are often best lest to the database, where (proper) indexing can provide streamed access to large sets of data. Relatively static lookup value substitution and security checks (via permissions/user tables) are best moved closer to the user.

I'm also a big fan of building transactional updates in "service-space" and using transactional coordination to ensure ACID, rather than making bulky stored procedures to churn over bits of procedural data.

[facorreia]

I concur. Exadatas ain't cheap and they're selling like hot cakes. It's cheaper and quicker to scale horizontally than vertically and that is particularly true when the database becomes a huge performance bottleneck taking several DBAs' full attention trying to deal with I/O contention.