I had the luck of doing a project with an experienced database administrator and programmer the other day.

Our work flow was that I coded stuff in Perl, and when I had trouble writing a routine that didn't violate the tightly formulated constraints, I asked him to write me stored procedure to the stuff in the DB. Likewise when I needed a non-trivial join he came up with a stored procedure or a view.

It worked pretty well that way, IMHO. And I can recommend this working style, because it combines laziness on your side with re-usability on the database side.