That is absurd. Saying that using a certain data access api tightly couples you to it is as crazy as saying using variables tightly couple you to ram (and usin

That is absurd. Saying that using a certain data access api tightly couples you to it is as crazy as saying using variables tightly couple you to ram (and using ram is obviously bad!). I honestly don't think you understand what tight coupling means. You have data. To access the data you use an api. SQL is forcing you to use a generalised API, which is very old, hard to use and more importantly; hard to test. If you actually want rigor in your SQL API, you use stored procedures. So now you're maintaining two languages (SQL and stored procedures) in addition to your application language. For me, for most things, I just write a webservice which talks to whatever database I want. That's the API I expose. Anything can consume the API as long as it follows my RESTful spec. With this architecture, I; 1) Don't have to struggle with SQL, making development faster. 2) Don't need a DBA making development cheaper. 3) Get to write in one language making testing a lot easier, which in turn makes quality higher. 4) can scale easier, picking whatever data storage characteristics are important to me. Lastly, saying that NoSQL just doesn't have this rigor really makes me wonder what you think of google's bigtable or amazon's simpledb?