I can look at all the attributes, or take the attributes off and look purely at the relationships. I can look at inheritance hierarchies. There's no way you could ever get this level of understanding and detail without modeling. And I think it's a large part of our success in putting together a good software architecture and a quality design. I wouldn't attempt it without Rose.
Application servers implement both the business services and data access.
Oracle is the centralized database repository and is accessed using TOPLink, an OO-Relational mapping tool from the Object People. This dramatically increases performance and reduces network traffic. One of the problems with web or thin client systems is that you're going across the network all the time. You enter a form, it goes across the network, validates it, and it comes back. We serialize business objects to the client and have the code available on the client side to provide rapid feedback to the user.