I agree. Early on in my career I had a general distaste for relational databases but after finding my way back to using them I now realize that most of the iss

I agree. Early on in my career I had a general distaste for relational databases but after finding my way back to using them I now realize that most of the issues I had were really just limitations of the software (and to some degree the hardware) at that time that caused large amounts of design-time analysis paralysis. eg. WILL THIS VARCHAR COLUMN EVER BE BIGGER THAN N? How should I size it? I don't want to size it too small and then have to rewrite the column... But bytes are precious... Oh, dear! Now I just make it a TEXT in Postgres and don't worry about it. Obviously you might have good reasons to limit the size of a text column for other reasons (security, interoperability... YMMV depending upon lots of factors), but it is nice to not have to think about it if you otherwise have no reason to think about it. The actual relational bits of the relational database never bothered me and in fact I quite liked the abstraction they provided, but I really hated how rigid the systems were at the column level, which is now pretty much solved.