Recursive CTEs are not what one would traditionally call 'relational' and many relational databases certainly don't have them. Some distributed graph databases

Recursive CTEs are not what one would traditionally call 'relational' and many relational databases certainly don't have them. Some distributed graph databases do store ids and not addresses - there is no actual requirement that they be addresses, only that they be efficient to retrieve. So not actually more accurate. People still call object-db mappers 'ORMs' even when dealing with document databases such as Google's bigtable or MongoDB. It's just an acronym at this point. [1][2] [1] - http://mongomapper.com/ http://mongomapper.com/ [2] - https://code.google.com/p/mongo-java-orm/ https://code.google.com/p/mongo-java-orm/ EDIT: By 'id' I'm referring to some unique hash or key that can be used to locate a document. By 'address' I'm referring to an actual on-disk location that can be directly loaded. Maybe my definitions clash with yours, I don't think this stuff is formally defined.