edw519: I'm not sure you got the point of my article. I am a programmer who happens to like relational databases. I have enough experience with RDBMSs (and the

edw519: I'm not sure you got the point of my article. I am a programmer who happens to like relational databases. I have enough experience with RDBMSs (and the same half-baked alternatives you've run into) to at least have an opinion. My article was not criticizing RDBMSs or SQL, but rather giving my opinions on why so many programmers don't like or don't understand relational databases. My anecdotal experience is that a lot of programmers bristle when they get into a technical area that actually has a mathematical basis or a demonstrably right way to solve a problem. Programmers are used to problems that have lots of possible solutions, none of them provably right or wrong. I've seen that attitude in the realms of databases, computer graphics, compilers, and algorithms. A few years ago I worked with a programmer who actually set out to prove to me that bubble sort was more efficient than whatever Oracle was doing to sort rows. He was retrieving a lot of rows, unsorted, then sorting them with his own code. Even pulling out Knuth and trying to explain big-O notation to him had no effect -- that was just so much academic bullshit and opinion that didn't apply, according to him. Of course Oracle was able to sort the rows orders of magnitude faster than his PL/SQL bubble sort, and the <i>coup do grace</i> was delivered by a DBA who took the inefficient cursors out of the solution. That kind of thing is played out every day between programmers, and when they run into something like relational theory their first instinct is all too often to dismiss it as old, inapplicable, ugly (see the other comments in this forum), rigid, etc. Those are all code for "I don't understand it and I can't be bothered to learn it." When a DBA who is charged with maintaining data integrity interferes with whatever bad idea the programmer has he or she is subjected to <i>ad hominem</i> attacks. Some DBAs no doubt deserve contempt but in my experience a lot of programmers can and should be learning from DBAs rather than sneering at them. In the comments in this forum you'll see the "Relational databases can't work with tree-structured data" canard hauled out, as if this exact problem hadn't been addressed numerous times in the database literature (Joe Celko, Fabian Pascal, Chris Date, etc.). That's ignorance, and the older I get the more I suspect it's more willful than I'd like to think.