[batou]

That's a poor argument because we're not discussing the arbitraty boundary of storing versus working with data as the lines between those are very blurred. This is even more the case when you use stored procedures which work with data close to the storage.

While we're on this subject, RDBMS are no better at storing data than any other technology out there[1]. In fact when you start thinking abstractly like this, other tech such as Riak makes sense for a lot of workloads.

The only real benefits of RDBMS' are fixed schema, fungibility of staff, the ability to issue completely random queries and get a result in a reasonable amount of time and the proliferation of ORMs.

[1] Caveated on insane design decisions like MyISAM storage engine and MongoDB as a whole.

[AlisdairO]

Riak makes sense for some workloads. For the vast majority of workloads out there, you will save time and money with an ACID system. Good ACID systems are mostly RDBMSs, so I would say, for now at least, that typical RDBMSs do have a leg up on other technologies out there.

[batou]

Definitely. Which is why we still use one. It's cheap, already there and does the job.