For the most part I agree that databases are (duh) for data. But Slash is a unique system. Templates live on the file system until they're compiled into the database as native Perl. Then they're read at server startup by mod_perl and cached in memory for the life of the server.

The drawbacks are numerous and obvious. The benefits of this I can see are:

• Faster web server startup than if the templates were on a filesystem, uncompiled.
• Single point of optimization (DB server) to improve template access speed.
• Fastest possible page rendering.

But maybe I'm missing something, and I certainly don't know everything about Slash. Maybe chromatic will reply.