Ask HN: Application in Database

In a recent interview[1], Ryan Dahl mentioned that he agrees with the CouchDB people that the bulk of an application can be kept in the database, a lot of the UI is done in the browser and the "application" itself (Node-based in his case) would just proxy data back and forth?

Am I missing some recent developments here? I thought that with document- and K/V-databases we'd be actually moving further away from the troublesome realm of stored procedures, maybe even a bit too far (lots of integrity constraints etc. have to be managed by the app now).

I could imagine something like this for rather simple CRUD applications, but anything more than that sounds a bit disconcerting. My current job involves a database where petri nets and conditions are modeled via tables, making it very hard for me to cling to my sanity.

So, is this an actual trend and what's involved?

[1]: http://dailyjs.com/2010/08/11/ryan-dahl-part-2/