I'm coming in on the tail end of this, but here goes.

Objects represent business concepts. RDBMS's store business data. The two (rarely) map in a clean 1-to-1 fashion. What chromatic was referring to in that article had to do with the fact that each object knows how to get the data it needs from the database and how to write that data back, should that be needed. That data would be retrieved if and only if it is needed, kept in memory for as short a period of time, then updated as appropriate.

An important point to remember is that most objects within a web application have a TTL of under a second - just long enough for the request to be serviced. Synchronization is very rarely a concern, even in a mod_perl environment - for that very reason.