Data scientists originally came from science, not database administration and business analytics, hence the science in the name. Databases weren't big in scien

Data scientists originally came from science, not database administration and business analytics, hence the science in the name. Databases weren't big in science because they used to be row oriented and most questions in science are column oriented. Most workloads in science are of the map, filter, reduce variety. If you used a regular rdms for those it would have extremely poor performance and scalability. Computers have caught up with most business sized datasets. Today you can fit every human begin alive in a database that can fit on a single Postgres database without too much trouble and even run queries against them. This was not the case in 2012 when the term was invented.