[gizzlon]

"What I find tiresome is low-level, record-at-a-time programming when doing what could be expressed concisely as, say, a 5-way join with aggregation"

Again, that depends on what you are doing. Converting back and forth between rows/tables and, say, data stored in hashes, is tiresome. It's also unnatural when the data doesn't "fit" in the relational model. Of course it works, but writing all this banal sql is not fun.

"I really think you need to learn something about RDBMS fundamentals...."

Right.. I was talking about the software. Maybe "models" is the wrong word.

"But now take the next step and do an objective comparison between old and new"

Believe it's pretty objective already.