Here's the classic and humorous letter critical of relational databases (RDBMS) penned in 1991 by Henry Baker and published in the Communications of the ACM: h

Here's the classic and humorous letter critical of relational databases (RDBMS) penned in 1991 by Henry Baker and published in the Communications of the ACM: http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/letters/CACM-RelationalDatabases.html http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/letters/CACM-RelationalDat... Almost an "RDBMS Considered Harmful" screed, Baker's letter may seem humorous in today's environment and even ludicrous to those who did not live through the transition from older file-systems/DBMS to RDBMS. To those of us who did experience that transition, Baker was painfully on-point and his letter served as a scourge to improve systems performance for more than a decade beyond that period. More recently the major RDBMS vendors have complemented SQL with directives that address the storage and handling of hierarchical data, e.g., in POSTGRESQL: https://www.technobytz.com/closure_table_store_hierarchical_data.html https://www.technobytz.com/closure_table_store_hierarchical_... Baker was no prophet: his letter showed high hopes for object-oriented databases, another technology that noisily rose and quietly fell in popularity.