Agreed, and some of these databases don't even embrace it. For example, HBase's main website makes no mention of being a "NoSQL" database (http://hbase.apache.

Agreed, and some of these databases don't even embrace it. For example, HBase's main website makes no mention of being a "NoSQL" database (http://hbase.apache.org/ http://hbase.apache.org/). Of course, given the right circumstances, you could totally use SQL to talk to your data which lives in HBase, but that doesn't make it a SQL database. SQL is a query language, a database is usually made up of many different components, one of them usually being a query engine. Look at Impala (https://github.com/cloudera/impala https://github.com/cloudera/impala) which decouples itself completely from the storage engine layer, it can query data CSV data, doesn't mean it's a SQL database.