No that's a fair critique, if your application is dealing with a large amount of pretty darn static data and "refreshing" the database is as simple as switching

No that's a fair critique, if your application is dealing with a large amount of pretty darn static data and "refreshing" the database is as simple as switching to a backup, you could make the argument it's a lot more attractive. I just think that most applications need stuff to be ACID and deal with a lot of writes (or may want to deal with some of those things later) and make this a bad idea. If they are made to views, you have the problem of how do you roll out/back those changes. You could obviously make that configuration on the server side, but then you're still needing to roll out both the service's configuration changes and the database, when if you put all the logic in the service, you only need to handle that for the service. I don't mind abstracting the views into another mental layer, but it's a harder sell to convince me that reduces a ton of risk because doing operations on the database (even if you have a perfect permission setup) is risky, because you can, by definition, impact that machine that's serving live customers.