Today was the first day of a two day Oracle training conference here in DC. Tom Kyte, of asktom.oracle.com gave an enjoyable presentation. He strongly believes that application development should start in the database, use all features and facilities provided by the database (e.g. use dbms_job instead of cron), and freely admits that coding for database independence is not usually a good thing. In defense of this last one, he quoted this recent rantanswer he gave to a question on his website.