My big realization was that the relational model is a constraint on your data so that relational algebra can optimize your queries for perf. But these constrain

My big realization was that the relational model is a constraint on your data so that relational algebra can optimize your queries for perf. But these constraints cause a whole range of issues, which always result in a poorly modeled domain as people try to work around the limits of the optimizer or the expressiveness of SQL. I've always felt that what we need is a way to maintain a logical schema (E-R diagram / graph schema), and then the physical schema is automatically generated along with denormalizations for perf as necessary. A graph db is simply denormalizing its joins using index-free adjacency.