1) Makes no sense whatsoever; stored procedures are typically going to be much faster than the equivalent mix of application-level code written in a scripting language that needs to communicate with a database and is likely vastly slower than PL/pgSQL or PL/SQL. The hardware licensing costs having nothing to do with stored procedures and apply just as much to anything else (there's free as an beer options and costly proprietary ones in either case).
2) This is not a reasonable objection, I could replace "loaded" with "compiled" and your non-argument would make just as much sense. The alternative does not make the "complexity" go away, it just distributes across multiple languages in your application and database.
3) No.
4) Another non-argument against stored procedures. For example, suppose I have a table "time_series(series_id INT, tstamp TIMESTAMP, val NUMERIC)". A common need would be to accumulate all points (tstamp, val) associated with a series_id. Following your logic, you either end up with tons of con the application side sending similar variations of a query that looks like "SELECT tstamp, val FROM time_series WHERE series_id = $x ORDER BY tstamp" or you create one application-level module that acts as an abstraction around a query like that. In the first case, you're doing massive duplication. In the second case, you've essentially made a stored procedure that is distributed across your database and application and all the issues you raised of having to write something to talk to it apply just the same.
5) Again, no. DBs are precisely to place to deal with issues like this as they have means for dealing with things like foreign tables. The application-level alternative just means re-inventing it all yourself and you're probably going to make a lot more mistakes and write a lot more code that way.
6) Non-argument (applies just as well to Rails, Python, Linux, etc.)
This is fucking horrible. If there was so much as an ounce of truth to all the noise Google has been making about "diversity" over the past couple years, they had better have one hell of an answer for all this very, very soon. And if they don't, well that also is one hell of an answer, although an extremely discouraging one for any of us concerned with fairness and equality in the tech space.
Erica: sharing your experiences the way you did was extremely brave. I can only imagine what you must be going through having already braved such a minefield of abuse in what ought to be a progressive and accepting work environment. Keep fighting the good fight.
Transgender people are probably more hated than any other minority and hate-speech that would be completely unacceptable made about any other group often goes unchallenged when made about members of the transgender community. So it's not at all surprising a member of this group is having trouble finding her legal defence. And that's a problem.
Stop it. Woman do not somehow have to share the blame for their husbands alleged misdeeds. Seriously, this is 2015, not the middle ages where they'd burn a woman at the stake for something her husband did wrong.
>Exactly. They seem to forget that she's part of a ponzi scheme, slept with married men to get ahead, etc.
For god's sakes, stop it. This blatant sexism and double standards is disgusting. If Ellen were a man, never in a million years would they be expected to bear responsibility for their spouses' misdeeds or attacked for who they slept with (indeed, they'd be getting high-fived for being a "womanizer" or "stud").
> I don't understand how anyone can defend her and her husband after one of them (allegedly) ruined the pension funds of thousands of clients who trusted them
This is 2015, I really hope you don't need someone to explain to you that women don't have to share the blame for their husbands (alleged) misdeeds. Disgusting.
We unfortunately do not have enough women or people of color in positions of authority for me to provide some rigorous statistics documenting the experiences of a swath of such people (though this gives a good indicator we've got a problem).
However, it seems quite clear to me that minorities in positions of authority or public visibility face a level of vitriol unlike that experienced by some boring old white guy. Look at the level of hatred directed towards Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama; look at the hatred directed towards a woman trying to present at a tech conference; look at the death threats Anita Sarkeesian has received for making YouTube videos on video games.
Let's be frank, if it was "Eric" rather than "Ellen" Pao (and, even more so, if it were "Smith" rather than "Pao"), we wouldn't be hearing 1/1,000,000th the uproar we've heard about all this.
Nothing drives Angry White Men on The Internet more ballistic than a woman or a person of color in a position of authority. You see the exact same thing with the sheer insanity the right-wing is driven to by President Obama's essentially centrist administration.
It's offensive how whenever topics of bigotry and hatred in tech come up, the ensuing conversation is always dominated by regular commenters (typically privileged white males) giving their two cents on something they've never experienced and have no way of relating to. Here's a radical idea: if you're actually interested in supporting and being an ally of women, people of color, LGBTQs and other minorities DO sit back, let them speak and listen. DO NOT inject your own unsubstantiated and unhelpful opinions into a topic you by definition cannot relate to.