This may start to depend on exactly what you're willing to call relational, but because you still want the schema & foreign key constraints for example enforced

This may start to depend on exactly what you're willing to call relational, but because you still want the schema & foreign key constraints for example enforced in the database, you're just going to do the actual mechanics of joining the data in the application? join_users_and_widgets( run_sql('select * from users where account_id = :1', req.account_id), run_sql('select * from widgets'), ) for example, where the db still enforces that `widgets.owner_id` is a fk to `users.id` say. And `join_users_and_widgets` only has to know the current version of the schema, all rows have the same columns as it were.