[Vivtek]

I agree entirely - I think when people rebel against "relational databases" they're actually just realizing that the normalization fetish can be harmful in many application cases.

You're better off with MySQL or PostgreSQL managing a key-value table where the value is a blob of JSON (or XML, which I've done in the past), then defining a custom index, which is pretty damn easy in PostgreSQL. Then you have hundreds of genius-years of effort keeping everything stable, and you still get NoSQL's benefits. Everybody wins.

[einhverfr]

Normalization is a tricky thing. On one hand, highly normalized databases have better flexibility in reporting, IMHO. On the other, you lose some expressiveness regarding data constraints. High degrees of normalization would be ideal if cross-relation constraints were possible. As they are not, typically one has to normalize in part based on constraint dependencies just as much as data dependencies.