Ya, I think there are definitely cases where it becomes very burdensome to use a NoSQL setup. Certainly anything where you are wanting to do analysis in the DB

Ya, I think there are definitely cases where it becomes very burdensome to use a NoSQL setup. Certainly anything where you are wanting to do analysis in the DB doesn't work very well. In your particular case I guess you'd have to do two queries. One to grab the users in the range you have, then another to grab the interests for that range. One interesting bit is that you could fire those off in // if you so wished, then do the merge. As I said earlier, it does kind of require you to really think through your access patterns ahead of time before going the NoSQL route. And at least in SimpleDB there is no doubt not being able to query across 'tables' can be a big letdown. But really it is those kinds of queries that eventually turn into problems, so to some extent it just forces you to think of the right way of doing things first. (I know, and agree that optimize last is usually a better strategy)