[LGBT_2000]

1) Makes no sense whatsoever; stored procedures are typically going to be much faster than the equivalent mix of application-level code written in a scripting language that needs to communicate with a database and is likely vastly slower than PL/pgSQL or PL/SQL. The hardware licensing costs having nothing to do with stored procedures and apply just as much to anything else (there's free as an beer options and costly proprietary ones in either case).

2) This is not a reasonable objection, I could replace "loaded" with "compiled" and your non-argument would make just as much sense. The alternative does not make the "complexity" go away, it just distributes across multiple languages in your application and database.

3) No.

4) Another non-argument against stored procedures. For example, suppose I have a table "time_series(series_id INT, tstamp TIMESTAMP, val NUMERIC)". A common need would be to accumulate all points (tstamp, val) associated with a series_id. Following your logic, you either end up with tons of con the application side sending similar variations of a query that looks like "SELECT tstamp, val FROM time_series WHERE series_id = $x ORDER BY tstamp" or you create one application-level module that acts as an abstraction around a query like that. In the first case, you're doing massive duplication. In the second case, you've essentially made a stored procedure that is distributed across your database and application and all the issues you raised of having to write something to talk to it apply just the same.

5) Again, no. DBs are precisely to place to deal with issues like this as they have means for dealing with things like foreign tables. The application-level alternative just means re-inventing it all yourself and you're probably going to make a lot more mistakes and write a lot more code that way.

6) Non-argument (applies just as well to Rails, Python, Linux, etc.)