[simonw]

My personal theory is that NoSQL happened because most people found relational database schema changes far too difficult.

I've been protected from this by the Django migrations system for over a decade at this point (that landed in Sep 2014, but predecessor South was usable for quite a few years before that point).

But if you don't have a good migrations system in place, changing the schema of your relational database (and keeping those changes synced across development machines, staging, production etc) is enormously painful - even more so for applications with a lot of production traffic.

I've seen many situations where engineers have made sub-par design decisions in order to avoid having to add or modify a column on a large, existing table for a production system.

[justsomeuser]

I think it is more to do with the so called "Object–relational impedance mismatch", which I guess is related to schema migrations.

NoSQL would still have migration issues as the types change over time, much like the table schemas. You would need to be able to read/write older objects stored, or transform them all to the newer object schema in one go.

I remember when Mongo DB first came out, it seemed the most liked feature was that you could just JSON.stringify and JSON.parse things into and out of the db.

I personally prefer SQL tables, as the act of designing the tables and their relations seems to half way solve a problem, and removes the issue of "which tree structure should this value live in, how do I copy it to both of these types?".

[number6]

Django is such a blessing in many regards. Protected me from SPA, JWT, Database Migrations, GrapghQL (realized I don't need it with Djangos ORM) to name a few, while never really stopping me to use these technologies if I really wanted to.

Thanks for your work!