I’m listening to the Hanselminutes Podcast; \"StackOverflow uses ASP.NET MVC - Jeff Atwood and his technical team\". During the course of the Podcast they are speaking about SQL
maybe i'm too old-school, or too lazy, or both, but i have to disagree. Time and again stored procedures have 'saved the day' because when a minor back-end change or bug appears we only have to fix the stored procedure instead of updating the desktop application on several dozen desktops plus the web server. In addition, the users are not interrupted. This saves a great deal of effort and user hassle.
In addition, some DB operations are just going to be more efficient on the server rather than going back-and-forth across the network, esp. when one stored procedure calls another which calls another etc. (with or without cursors)
EDIT: in a SOA architecture the update-the-client-apps issue is mitigated (thanks maud-dib), but stored procedures calling each other is still more efficient than multiple network round-trips to the SOA layer. And updating the SOA layer is not always trivial either.