The biggest SQL problems I've seen the last few years have been ORM using developers using the database as a data structure store, rather than a database. Fo

The biggest SQL problems I've seen the last few years have been ORM using developers using the database as a data structure store, rather than a database. For some reason, the act of getting data in and out of a database was the "hard problem" that had to be solved. I know this sounds parochial and if you're a close to no money start-up then it might as well be Greek but there is a reason for the business tier in a 3 tier architecture, it translates transactional data in to your data structures... Done well it can scale like a mutha. I do sort of appreciate the approach of NoSQL though. Map/Reduce is a concept missing from RDBMS and it seems like it could be incredibly valuable for certain problems. There are probably other concepts that could be applied as well. At some point I see the two camps sort of merging back together. ACID is just too important.