Careful here: while this may be true of some NoSQL stores that I've not used, this is a tarpit for the wide column datastores I'm familiar with (Dynamo, Cassand

Careful here: while this may be true of some NoSQL stores that I've not used, this is a tarpit for the wide column datastores I'm familiar with (Dynamo, Cassandra, and others). It's very easy to get going quickly and find out that you've tripped over antipatterns, and now your database is "a database, a Ruby app, and 30ms of latency on every call". It's easy to think "I'll model this later" and end up hitting the database five times in a row to answer a question. With these systems, up front modeling of your data model and access patterns is essential if the trade off you are trying to make (far less functionality for smooth performance at ridiculous scale) will ever make sense.