> The biggest hangup other than the UX issues the author talks about is the fear of having to manually shard your data. There are a lot of promises about automa

> The biggest hangup other than the UX issues the author talks about is the fear of having to manually shard your data. There are a lot of promises about automatically sharding your data from NoSQL vendors but I have no idea if they actually are able to deliver on this. If you are just doing a K-V store, then of course sharding is easy, regardless of the database you are using. I don't think there is really a silver bullet here, just maybe better tooling and removing redundant manual steps. You still need to think carefully about data access paths and queries and so on. Any additional sharding-centric features of NoSQL databases missing in mainstream databases could presumably be added, if they don't exist already with poor UX. Original author here. Yes this is definitely another real hangup, though I semi-intentionally left this one out as magical sharding is still a bit unclear of how well it works depending on who you talk to. > For example PostgreSQL replication, wal log archiving, etc works great but it's still a bit tougher to set up than the more magical cluster auto discovery/configuration/sync stuff you see in things like elasticsearch. It would be interesting if the PostgreSQL people made a real push for a release to tighten up the operational UX of the product to be more human friendly instead of adding on more core features. (Not that I'm complaining, it's great!) A big plus one on all this as well, and we're doing what we can to push it forward.