Interesting article... my company has created a niche in campaign management software by creating an "open-architecture" product. If the underlying tables in the database change, the product reflects the change. This does, however, require much more intelligent users.

I, for one, am entirely in favor of building the database first. Maybe I'm missing something, but why does the article assume that the database will only be used by one tool? We recently built a database for a client who is using three separate tools (by three different companies), but since each tool communicates directly with the database they can operate independently in unison with each other. This would not have been possible if we had built the database with one specific tool in mind. I think we are moving past the days of forcing the database into a specific format for a tool to work.