[sanderjd]

Your solutions to these problems (like "do validation and integrity in the application layer" and "build a shared ORM layer for multiple applications") are definitely possible solutions to the problems, but you state them as if they are obviously the best solutions. They actually sound a lot harder to me and seem to be driven by some theoretical purity in having a dumb data store that I don't really understand. Building a shared ORM layer for multiple applications to use is just a hack around having a shared data store layer doing validation and integrity, which is what a smarter database already does. It's reinventing one of the really hard things that databases are already good at. What is the advantage?

I've also never made an application that doesn't eventually want to do something that the ORM I'm using doesn't know how to do, at which point it makes a lot more sense to interact directly with the database than to shrug my shoulders and say "I guess I can't do that".

Maybe my applications just aren't "modern" enough.