Sorry, but that simply isn't true for plenty of applications, particularly if they happen to be built on relatively slow platforms like PHP, Ruby, Python, etc. That's even before we get to the bulky frameworks built on top of those!
If your data store structure and queries (SQL or otherwise) are designed to perform and scale, you can get in and out very quickly (milliseconds or less), after which you'll spend most of your time turning the data into something useful.
(That's even before we talk about caching so you don't have to talk to the data store at all...)
Facebook didn't write HipHop (and reduce CPU utilisation by 50%) because their database queries were slow!
If your data store structure and queries (SQL or otherwise) are designed to perform and scale, you can get in and out very quickly (milliseconds or less), after which you'll spend most of your time turning the data into something useful.
(That's even before we talk about caching so you don't have to talk to the data store at all...)
Facebook didn't write HipHop (and reduce CPU utilisation by 50%) because their database queries were slow!