You're not forced to use joins and most DBs don't force you to use transactions if you don't need them. Sharding is supported by postgres, oracle, sqlserver and

You're not forced to use joins and most DBs don't force you to use transactions if you don't need them. Sharding is supported by postgres, oracle, sqlserver and mysql, even if it's not the recommended solution in all cases. A database doesn't magically start to scale by not supporting SQL nor does SQL support magically prevent it from scaling.