If you're looking for the ability to switch data storage technologies, you'd do better to just make sure your data storage layer is cleanly isolated. Sticking

If you're looking for the ability to switch data storage technologies, you'd do better to just make sure your data storage layer is cleanly isolated. Sticking to 1990s SQL gives you the ability to swap among 5 or 6 different databases, all of which have been around for a day or two, none of which have seen a whole lot of change in their relative strengths and weaknesses in a good long while. It's just not super likely that you'll find a compelling reason to switch among them, especially if the people who made the original choice did their homework first. Keeping a well-isolated data layer, on the other hand, gives you a much wider universe of things you can attainably switch to - document stores, triplestores, graph DBs, Cassandra, Hadoop/Hive, stuff that hasn't been invented yet, etc. I've lived through my fair share of database technology migrations. So far, every single one of them has been this kind, not a SQL -> SQL migration. So, while you're at it, might as well get your money's worth out of the SQL DB.