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I am not sure your utopia is quite as utopian as you think. I've been working on an internal service at a major tech company for a few years now. The project is

I am not sure your utopia is quite as utopian as you think. I've been working on an internal service at a major tech company for a few years now. The project is awesome and super fun, the teams is great, etc. - but the overall size of the data and query load for key "working set" data store would easily be served by an RDBMS including (all likely future growth for 5+ years), yet we went for a (managed) distributed document store. We are paying more money and dealing with all the complexity and limitations of a NoSQL document store, while we could have just used great ORM/SQL and enjoyed those sweet, sweet transactions and joins and the wealth of tooling that exists for mature RDBMS solutions. Sometimes, it would be great to simply choose the right tool for the job, even if it isn't sexy and doesn't help anyone add "distributed NoSQL database" to their CV...

kevincox 4y ago
I never said NoSQL. I think the relational model is incredibly valuable. I'm talking about updating the implementation, not the interface. However there are some new databases that maintain a relational model (often fully compatible with PostrgeSQL or other relational DBs). The only real downside to these right now is stability and performance. Performance isn't a big deal when you can scale horizontally so I think when this "NewSQL" generation matures it will be nearly all upsides. I'm not sure we will be stuck with SQL forever but strong consistency, SQL and the database-backed constraints and indexes are invaluable and I wouldn't want to be stuck without them.