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The concept of "brainfuck" is one that is constructive, whereas "nosql" is deconstructive: one defines something from nothing, and the other defines something only by what it isn't. When you look at the ecosystem of NoSQL solutions, you don't really find much commonality... there are patterns, but they are largely defined by prototypical examples that are insanely disparate (BigTable, Dynamo, memcached). Your past experience working with HBase (other than in the general "problem solving skills transfer" way) doesn't help one later work with fundamentally different systems like Riak.

Your sarcasm thereby definitely hits the exact statement made, but seems to entirely miss the underlying point: you are correct that even for SQL you have to use a concrete implementation, not the abstract concept, but to an important extent which database you end up using doesn't really matter... they are all pretty much the same (and yes, this is coming from someone who in different contexts will implore people to not judge "SQL" poorly due to problems inherent in "MySQL"). That is just not true of "NoSQL": if you want to be a little more honest in the comparison, you could try something like "not-Java" (which one also imagines is difficult to use inside of a big-company matrix).