Came here to say exactly this. Also a gopher, who is also vaguely horrified at all the "use GORM, and a framework" advice to newbie gophers.

I also use stored procedures, and treat them as function calls from my application code. So I effectively build a "data storage API" in the database, that I then call (as you say, like any other service) from my code.

I also have views for all the data sets that will be returned to the application, so I can use them easily as a type for function returns, and enforce consistency.