I don't entirely disagree with you but I do think you're not doing anybody any favors by "disrupting this conventional wisdom." When I was an engineer at Forms

I don't entirely disagree with you but I do think you're not doing anybody any favors by "disrupting this conventional wisdom." When I was an engineer at Formspring I profiled our social graph service which was basically PHP client hitting a Python service that queries against Cassandra. Thrift was used to communicate between PHP and the Graph Service and, being Cassandra, Thrift was used between the Python Cassandra client and the Cassandra server. So, two-way serialization, twice. In the end, this isn't a bad design. I didn't write it then but if I were re-writing it now I'd probably use protobuffs but aside from that, it was a clean separation of concerns and fit in nicely with our larger SOA. Point being, though, that serialization is CPU expensive. Reading from Cassandra was blazingly fast compared to the work Thrift was doing. All that said, I think noob engineers should be taught that network operations (db queries included) are at least an order of magnitude slower than, say, opening and writing to a local socket. Experienced engineers can see the balanced view of things and agree with the point you're making, so advocating it, IMO, will only serve to make you look smart and confuse noobs.