> I thought that Amazon, Google, FB et al moved away from relational databases because the sharding logic they needed to build Note that these companies did no

> I thought that Amazon, Google, FB et al moved away from relational databases because the sharding logic they needed to build Note that these companies did not move away from relational DBs until long after the "NoSQL is Web Scale" video. Yes, Google invented Big Table to help power search (and others), but their revenue system, AdWords, didn't move off MySQL until like 2015. And last I checked, Facebook is still a heavy user of MySQL with sharding. The original NoSQL software had two major value adds: you didn't have to learn a new language, and were faster (typically via disabling fsync -- the DBA equivalent of running with scissors). If you knew SQL or an ORM already, you were really just hoping mongoDB was faster magically. These days you can even just tune pgsql to support kv store formats: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/hstore.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/hstore.html. Yes, you'll have to pay someone to know how to DBA pgsql, or pay AWS to pay someone, but I'm comfortable paying that price.