Once upon a time, I administered a system that was built as a client application that just spole SQL, and a set of administrative tools running as the db superu

Once upon a time, I administered a system that was built as a client application that just spole SQL, and a set of administrative tools running as the db superuser to create the db and it's triggers. Permissions were handled entirely internally through functions - user management was just database user management. Most simple operations happened on views. More complex operations were functions. It worked pretty well - the worst part was Microsoft licensing, as we needed a SQL server client license for ever connected user. The second worst was the upgrade path - shutting the db server down such that clients couldn't connect but the super admin could to run the updates was tricky and failure prone, mostly because of a lack of tooling. Today, with features like row-level permissions and notify in postgres, I think you could do great things. That said, I mostly recommend the articles advice to my customers - the database is a database, put logic in your application.