Where to find discussion of EJB vs Database

I'm looking for some rational discussion/links/books related to the thought and engineering behind the 'middleware object vs database entity/stored procedure' discussion.

Everything I see is based on one of two premises:
"[in our shop DBA is king and therefore] all goes into database"; or
"[the Java developers are king and therefore] our business demands that
nothing except the data goes into the database".

The above arguments are generally based on lack of experience ("all I have is a hammer"), purely religious or emotional and are generally meaningless.

What I need is some straight forward discussion that helps decide, in an open minded shop, what to look for or how to decide (eg: benchmarks) to find the proper mix of middle tier and database tier responsibility.

This would include the arguments from the DB side of "enforcing business rules when people bypass the middle tier" as well as the arguments from the AS side of "smaller, portable machines for application scalability".

Why: I'm tired of the "we need to be database independent" argument. I firmly believe that 100% database independence is nonsense:

1. from a technical perspective - referring to the demonstrations in Tom Kyte's books should be sufficient argument;
2. from a business perspective - if you buy Oracle database, then developing & maintaining one line of code duplicating Oracle's extended functionality is a serious waste of business resources. (Stick with MySQL or PostgreSQL if you just want a data bucket)

Any pointers or links to supported arguments appreciated.

TIA
/Hans
forbrich at remove_this dot telus planet dot net Received on Sat Jun 12 2004 - 18:51:08 CDT