I'd highly recommend playing around with stored procedures. They, at a minimum, can provide data integrity guarantees that you can't get with anything else. As an example, for ages the only way to do a reliable (pseudo atomic) upsert call on most databases was through a stored procedure. Once I discovered stored procedures, I started using them everywhere. After a while I realised that you need to put your logic in the appropriate place for all of the usual reasons (performance, maintainability, security etc) and resisted the temptation to dump all business logic into stored procedures, but I still use them a lot. They're like the bridge between the dba world and the traditional developer world.

"An elegant weapon, for a more civilised age..."