Were you serving something that had to live in the database, or were you serving cached copies that didn't actually need to be updated or read within a transact

Were you serving something that had to live in the database, or were you serving cached copies that didn't actually need to be updated or read within a transaction? There's a crucial difference there. The moment you are required to access the database at all, the equation changes (which is usually true for data validation, inserts, updates or deletes, and constraint management). If all you're doing is reading static data, there's no need to touch the database more than once and you can do much better. Moreover, if all you need is causal or eventual consistency (for application-specific reasons), you can use databases that provide those semantics. In pretty much all cases, once you've chosen the correct database / semantics for your use case, you'll be better off from a performance perspective with stored procedures; 1:N doesn't really enter into it because databases can run with their own isolated state on multiple nodes just as well as applications can (indeed, there are some caching systems built around this observation)!