Sharding and SQL are orthogonal. However SQL doesn't make the problem of handling distributed databases magically disappear. An example of distributed, horizo

Sharding and SQL are orthogonal. However SQL doesn't make the problem of handling distributed databases magically disappear. An example of distributed, horizontally scalable database supporting strong consistency and offering an SQL interface: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/archive/spanner-osdi2012.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... and a layer above: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en/us/pubs/archive/41344.pdf http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.co... It still requires the users to carefully organize their data, according to a hierarchical data model provided by the database. There is a mapping between a hierarchical relational model and a column store model. (EDIT: see one possible mapping in http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2011/Papers/CIDR11_Paper32.pdf http://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2011/Papers/CIDR11_Paper32.pdf) The article skims over this aspect, as if all that matters is the syntax of the query language.