In my personal experience most of this is true. At Loopt we used MSSQL from the beginning. Things didn't start this way (because I was young and foolish), but

In my personal experience most of this is true. At Loopt we used MSSQL from the beginning. Things didn't start this way (because I was young and foolish), but in the end: * Each developer had their own local instance of the DB(s) for development. * All schema was kept under source control (now using RedGate SQL Source Control, a fantastic product, and earlier as simple sql scripts in Hg/Svn and database projects in Visual Studio). * Unit tests of the DB were done in code (C#). They set up their own initial state, ran against the local DB instance, and cleaned up after themselves by rolling back transactions. * Commits in source control triggered automatic SQL updates in dev using RedGate SQL Compare (though for a time we used the SQL tooling in Visual Studio, also command line scriptable, for this task). * Debugging performance was easy with performance monitor, set statistics (profile|io|time) on, and built in management views. Right click -> "Show what's expensive" kind of easy. * Debugging functionality was easy with step-in line by line debugging from the C# code calling it. * In many cases 5-10 round trips were avoided by keeping data local. Lots of network bandwidth was saved as well by only returning final results. * Used correctly, stored procedures encourage correct handling of parameters and can increase security -- Web server code didn't have read or write access to the raw data. It was constrained to calling the stored procedures (no way to dump all password hashes, for example). Think of it as another layer of defense. We tried to keep most of the complexity out of the DB because T-SQL is a terrible language. You'd have to be insane to write anything you didn't have to in it. To get optimal performance we occasionally had to do complex optimizations (table hints, indexed views, etc.), but all of that was still far easier than proper cache invalidation. Loopt ran with no cache because the DB worked just fine when tuned correctly.