People seem to be confusing "NoSQL" and "non-relational". Mongo happens to be both, but there's nothing fundamental that puts the two together. You may not get

People seem to be confusing "NoSQL" and "non-relational". Mongo happens to be both, but there's nothing fundamental that puts the two together. You may not get the full capabilities of SQL with non-relational data (JOINs, etc), but there's no reason that non-relational data stores couldn't parse normal SQL and execute the appropriate queries. You can make a relational database that doesn't support the SQL syntax, and you can use SQL syntax to interact with schemaless data (for added fun, try throwing JSON in a mysql/postgres text field). I'd agree with the article saying this is an abuse of JSON, though. It's a format to represent data; more accurately, potentially-nested key:value stores, arrays, and scalar types. A query is not data (unless you're one of those "my database has a 'queries' table" types)