From what I understand, data duplication can lead to consistency errors. And if you want to avoid data duplication, you're going to rewrite a relational databas

From what I understand, data duplication can lead to consistency errors. And if you want to avoid data duplication, you're going to rewrite a relational database yourself, since you would want to put your data into normal forms to avoid duplication. I think I've read a few times on Hacker News that we already went through the alternatives to the relational database around the time of its birth, and that a few papers were published at the time on why this was a better solution than others.