This seems like an ongoing debate, I remember similar discussions between Java developers and DBAs before the rise of RoR. The answer back then was to migrate business logic into business logic servers, with application servers talking to the business logic serves over a queue. Architectures like that allow organizations to have heterogenous application architectures: One company had .NET for internal apps and Java for customer-facing web systems.

Everything talked happily to a business logic server written in Java, and that server talked to a couple of different databases and some legacy systems, one of which was written in MUMPs.