The differences are more between desktop applications and database backed web apps. Once you put a database into the mix, some of the standard desktop techniques change up, so the database can be efficient.
The Anvil database doesn’t quite expose everything that you’d expect in a standard relational database, so there will be times in an Anvil app that the recommended technique is to pull the data out of the search iterator and work with it in Python.
But yeah, it’s a learning curve to know where the edges are.