This is not a quality article. As a sibling comment already noted, the author's purple prose[1] is tedious. As for the content, I can't figure out the logic o

This is not a quality article. As a sibling comment already noted, the author's purple prose[1] is tedious. As for the content, I can't figure out the logic of the particular technologies he's highlighting. In between the timeline of RDBMS and NoSQL, he doesn't mention object-oriented databases (Poet, Gemstone, etc) and he skips the rise of data warehouses (OLAP, star schemas, etc). Lastly, NoSQL is driven by at least 2 orthogonal forces. #1) the ease-of-use API mapping "documents" to programming language objects (e.g. Javascript json) without using mappers such as ORMs. #2) the horizontal scale out of data nodes (HBase, Cassandra, etc) The author is talking about NoSQL in terms of #2 (big data) even though I suspect that the vast majority of motivations for NoSQL used in github projects is #1 (no joins is easy programming and I'm not saving terabytes of data anyway). One can do horizontal scale out using traditional RDBMS but it's complicated. That's what Facebook did with MySQL -- they created a custom app layer for sharding. One can also favor a document oriented programming interface without aspirations of a horizontal terabyte scale using a NoSQL like MongoDB. A lot of blog engines programmed in a weekend use MongoDB as a backend because the programming API is easy and productive. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose