Just remember, SQL is and always was "not only relational" - a play on the, should be long dead and buried acronym NoSQL (IMHO). Structured query language - I

Just remember, SQL is and always was "not only relational" - a play on the, should be long dead and buried acronym NoSQL (IMHO). Structured query language - I know for a fact from actually doing it (see Cache database, Hadoop schemaless SQL, even a product I worked on that was SQL to Mongo, heck the SQL standard itself) - guess what - it works with object/document stores too! Mongo could have implemented SQL on top of their storage engine a long time ago minus the joins. Instead they built their own query mechanisms. Mind you, mapreduce can't be reproduced explicitly in SQL, but SQL expressions can compile to Mapreduce (see Apache Hive), so even that was not an excuse. Edit: NoSQL served a purpose to remind people that there were other options other than relational databases (including those that predate the relational model and those that came after it), but man, what a terrible and misleading misnomer.