[cmrdporcupine]

Agree, 100%. I too early in my career was very enamored by object and graph databases (this is pre the 'nosql' buzz), but once I started reading Date and Codd (and the inflammatory Fabian Pascal) some lights starting turning on in my brain.

Firstly, it should be made clear to people that SQL is not truly relational, and a lot of the things people dislike about it are nothing to do with the relational model and more to do with its late 70s, early 80s heritage. It was thrown together at a time when business systems were still very focused around COBOL.

The second thing that people are not picking up on is that the industry _already_ went through a pre-sql "nosql" phase in the 60s and 70s when network and hierarchical databases were the norm, and the relational model was developed to deal with the perceived faults those systems had: an enforced topology which could not easily rearranged at query time, lack of rigor in modeling, lack of standardized modeling concepts and notation...

Finally, I did find in previous jobs certain uses for nosql systems -- very low latency high throughput quasi-realtime systems that deal with very small bits of simply structured data and need to distribute it widely across a cluster. For that I used Cassandra (tho I understand now that there are successors that are better).

What I don't get is the point of systems like Redis or MongoDB which don't offer a compelling distribution implementation and simply replace the fairly well understood quasi-relational model of SQL with their own ultimately inferior graph/network/hierarchical models.

[parasubvert]

As a fan of Cassandra (though not for its relational model ;), what successors do you believe are better? Riak is the only one that comes to mind.

Btw, to me the point of Redis and Mongo is a very fast distributed dictionary. They're data structure servers, for when you want to persist and share data structures across processes, not "manage information". It depends on your goal.