> pushing more and more work into the single hardest piece of software to scale - your database.

I never understood this argument. Maybe you can elaborate a bit? Almost all our apps use sp for data lifting work (most of the so called "business logic"), and we never got scaling problems. Well, we don't have that much users or data either, but how many users/data do you have that your stored procs could not keep up with? What numbers are we talking about?

What makes the db slow is throwing bad sql at it, not Stored Procs.