In many respects building a web application is very similar to building a database application, after all most web applications are only "front-ends" on databases.
The only big difference is in the sense that the web is worldwide, there's not really a big technical difference.
That's not to say that there aren't a lot of technologies involved in the web access side of things, it's saying once you're past that, all the rest of it is about the real heart of it, which is that all web applications are database applications.
They just happen to working across the web instead of a private network, at least that's the way most database applications were accessed from about 1985-2005.
Things have changed a lot in the last few years, because of the numbers involved I think it's safe to say the sum of all data read across the web in the last 5 years is greater than the sum of all data read by users on privates networks across all time.
So given that the database drives things, what drives the database? And how will such concerns affect a solution architecture?
Data is the answer, and the essentail numbers regarding the activity of the database. Information is the fuel that drivess the database engine, and you design an engine to maximise the use of the fuel it runs on. Activity in this context refers to the number and patterns of
CRUD operations.