I was floored by this quote. As technical founder, one of my chief priorities operationally is ensuring that a) our systems are up and b) our data is consistent

I was floored by this quote. As technical founder, one of my chief priorities operationally is ensuring that a) our systems are up and b) our data is consistent. I've dabbled in NoSQL (a la friendfeed) a bit and my head exploded when I wanted to migrate meta-schemas on multiple machines (potentially writing to the same data) with minimal concurrent alternate code paths. I need to be able to speak with 100% confidence that every object in our database is consistent and valid and without a schema on a database level this is really hard to enforce because anyone (including a bug) could accidentally throw a borked bag of properties into a key value store. A lot of the excitement over schema-less data stores (I think) really comes down to instant DDL changes, which is why you should really just use Postgres instead of MySQL.