Way back when I took my first database class by Mike Stonebraker, he talked of some of the old war stories between RDBMS and network-based database, which was h

Way back when I took my first database class by Mike Stonebraker, he talked of some of the old war stories between RDBMS and network-based database, which was hot before RDBMS. He said the relational model by Date and Codd had won out back then, for the simple fact that relational data stood by themselves while the network-based data were tightly coupled with the applications. When NoSQL came around, yep, it looked like the old network-based database again. History has repeated itself. Relational model, where SQL is merely the querying language, will win again and again, for the simple fact that it enables data to stand by themselves, and data tend to outlive applications, both in longevity and in scope. Edit: PostgreSQL came from Postgres, the research project started by Stonebraker and others in UCB.