Ok - well this is an interesting article in many respects - but it really brushed over the concepts around transactions. His bank transfer example is a bit ove

Ok - well this is an interesting article in many respects - but it really brushed over the concepts around transactions. His bank transfer example is a bit oversimplified. A well designed database can have very fine grained locks that avoid that kind of thing. Big Banks will run intraday work on something like IMS Fast Path and reconcile later. So - I don't think his examples are actually all that great - I think the better examples are literally hordes of websites out there using databases. These are a better target. If you running a forum you don't necessarily need the concurrency and casuality of a transactional database. What traditional databases do give you is a metaphor that is established, well known, easy to deploy, etc, etc. You can use SQL Server and be sure it's supported on your host, and that you can find people to program for it. Until the cloud space settles more in this respect (years away) this is still going to be very compelling. Interesting to watch the trend either way.