They aren't diametrically opposed. They are different aspects of the same thing. At the end of the day, it's all just tables. NoSQL gives you one table and a

They aren't diametrically opposed. They are different aspects of the same thing. At the end of the day, it's all just tables. NoSQL gives you one table and all sorts of scalability and robustness and tools for working with that table. RDBMSs give you many tables, and all sorts of robustness and scalability and tools for working with those many tables, and for putting them together in interesting ways to get answers to your questions. NoSQL allows for much greater scalability for your one table because it doesn't have to assume you are doing anything too complicated with it. Usually, you just want a few records at a time. That can be made fast, even if there are billions or trillions of other records, and they do make it fast. RDBMSs trade that sort of scalability for the ability to easily ask very very complicated questions and get answers reasonably quickly. And here's this guy in the article talking about RDBMSs with column oriented tables instead of row oriented tables. And then he bashed MapReduce, which is about transforming data, and has nothing to do with tables or storing and retrieving data. So NoSQL and RDBMSs are not diametrically opposed. Talking about them is like comparing apples and oranges, which are both fruit, but not equivalent. Throwing MapReduce in there is like comparing apples and oranges and blenders.