I’m still out on if the database as a service is a good or bad idea. I am leaning towards the latter though.
One of the scary things most developers do today is refactoring the database. I actually think a lot of good refactorings just isn’t done because it becomes a large and daunting task when it comes to databases. Exposing your schema directly to other consumers just makes this worse. An abstraction would help some, at the cost of maintaining the abstraction. I do feel that this abstraction could be functions and/or views, but for most Java developers this is much harder to maintain than a Java abstracion.
Check out this blog for some arguments against database as a service.