I remember a few years back - I don't remember exactly when, but i'd say around '07-ish, definitely a couple years before MongoDb appeared - some of my peers wh

I remember a few years back - I don't remember exactly when, but i'd say around '07-ish, definitely a couple years before MongoDb appeared - some of my peers who were highly proficient in Relational Databases began denormalizing their data to meet higher demands than we were used to. The basic idea was to turn tables into Key-Value stores and put Memcached in front of them. The higher the traffic, the less normalized the data became. Around this time, NoSQL databases started popping up, and a lot of my colleagues moved on to them since it fit so well with the trend toward denormalizing everything. Some loved them and dove in full-force. Personally, I kept working with normalized data, used a caching layer to handle the denormalized versions of the data and learned more about scaling with Master / Slave configurations, and honestly felt very much like I was being left behind. In order to see what the fuss was about, I tried a small personal project with MongoDB (this is pre-redis, I think), and honestly enjoyed the simplicity of it. And then my toy project got a sudden popularity bump from 20 users to 40k in a day and my project just died. I spent two weeks trying to keep up and then kinda got it working, but couldn't keep the site alive for more than a day. And since it was just a toy project, I just gave up completely. I've only used non-relational stores for portions of projects that explicitly warrant them, since.