I'm by no means a DB expert, but that was basically my understanding of the disadvantages as well. As other people have pointed out, you can use caching to fix

I'm by no means a DB expert, but that was basically my understanding of the disadvantages as well. As other people have pointed out, you can use caching to fix a lot of those performance issues. Of course, the author of the article also believes that every database is hooked to a web server that will be constantly pushing its data to hundreds of thousands/millions of users, that every 10 milliseconds lost means another 1% of your users abandon ship, and that if you claim to have some other circumstances, you are pleading "unique snowflake" status and should just get shut up and follow his advice anyway.