[hgimenez]

(I work on Heroku Postgres)

During the afformentioned "Sproc Hell", we were putting application logic in the database. Of course, this made perfect sense: it was secure because of bound params and strict typing, it was fast because it avoided several trips to the database for multi query operations and even for single query statements, query plans were precomputed and cached by the DB. You were also able to tweak application logic without deploying code, which was likely a clumsy process involving more than one team and various manual steps. This is all bollocks, as we've learned many scars and gray hairs later.

Now, the proposal here is entirely different. While yes, you are creating a function in your database, you are doing it to access data in a JSON structure, per the OP. Because in Postgres you can create an index on the result of any expression, including a function, you can now create indexes on functions that parse and access data your JSON docs. And it's fast.

[einhverfr]

I don't think it was all bollocks. It was just due to the fact that sproc interfaces sucked. Also development of quality sprocs is qualitatively different than upper level app code (among other things, you want a single large query front and center to the extent possible), and so if you write stored procedures the way you write application code they will suck.

Now, what we do with LedgerSMB is build our stored procedures as basically named queries, inspired by web services (both SOAP and REST have been inspirations there). The procedures are intended to be relatively discoverable at runtime, with the aggressive attempts to use what infrastructure exists for this purpose that REST gives for HTTP.

Stored procedures are not a problem. They allow you to encapsulate a database behind an API, and the desire to do that is a major point of Martin Fowler's NoSQL advocacy (arguing for doing this for NoSQL dbs).