This is a serious question, because I honestly don't know the answer. What purpose does node serve in more complex(i.e. non-static page) situations? Should it

This is a serious question, because I honestly don't know the answer. What purpose does node serve in more complex(i.e. non-static page) situations? Should it just be the intermediary between the users and your database process? Heck, should the database process also handle all the formatting of the data as well as the queries? That is fairly CPU intensive(and doesn't scale well at all), especially if you're getting to larger data sets.