It's kinda bad, but fine if you have low latency from servers to DB. And, if your other servers are very careful about not holding transactions open. That's a

It's kinda bad, but fine if you have low latency from servers to DB. And, if your other servers are very careful about not holding transactions open. That's a big one. You can't be sloppy and hang a connection open with transactions running. This is bad for slow languages where every transaction takes 10+ms. And it's bad if your language doesn't support connection pools/threading. In practice that means you can get full performance with fast threaded languages like Java, C#, Go, Rust that can use connection pooling. But performance will suffer if language is slow or doesn't have good enough threading to do connection pooling. So yeah, it's a bad-ish design that works fine if you're using a fast threaded language. If you're trying to squeeze max performance out of Ruby or something you're going to be disappointed in other ways anyway