Wait, what’s wrong with NoSQL? It’s not good for shoving relational paradigms into, but it’s basically infinitely horizontally scalable, which, as far as I’m aware, isn’t possible with relational DBs, not at the same performance at massive scale, anyways.
A bit annoying when people shove a relational DB into a NoSQL schema though.
Why do you think it's impossible to scale relations (aka tables) to infitine scale? It is totally possible, just look at various analytical SQL-ish DB-likes (Apache Hive, Presto, BigQuery, Snowflake, etc).
Now, what's harder is to provide some of the stronger ACID guarantees, say, fully atomic distributed commits. Most of the time it's just a question of time it takes to reach full concensus in a distributed context.
But this has nothing to do with the relational data model itself, which is just tables of uniform rows referencing each other. Say what you like about SQL, but the core model is perfectly fine.
For a few years back there, it was going to take over the world and we were all going to throw away 'old fashioned' DBMSs because they were slow, clunky and overcomplicated.
Like many of these overhyped technologies, when the dust cleared about 5 years down the line, we are left with something useful that definitely has its place, but isn't like wow huge it's taken over everything maaaaan. Meanwhile SQL is still with us and still good at what it does too.
I don't believe I said anything was wrong with it or anything else there. Most of the things I listed have their uses. That was completely not my intention to say they're bad, I hope that's not the point people are getting from my post.
The point is how uncritically some of these things get taken, and how easily people will believe fantastic, unfounded claims. And not just a few gullible idiots, but huge swaths of academia and industry.
Nothing is wrong with NoSQL except for how it (often) gets used. NoSQL is just a dumping grounds for less-structured data that allows startups to accumulate tech debt more rapidly, while providing enough functionality to be useful.
Where I've seen it used is to delay the decision making process of adding structure to data, or a prototype database, before you are certain what your application's needs are. For simple disconnected data in low performance applications, they provide a low barrier to entry. But eventually people start embedding foreign keys into documents and the whole thing goes South.
> A bit annoying when people shove a relational DB into a NoSQL schema though
This is what is annoying with NoSQL the same as it was with OOP and now with FP.
People learn this as the new better way of doing something mostly because they heard at a conference a FAANG dev sharing it and then everything should be built with it.
I saw a lot of projects where the developer(s) used NoSQL just because it was available or it was hot or it was what they learned in a bootcamp/article. But then they added relations so now a User has Projects and each project has categories and with constraints on relations and more ...and everything is glued together with NoSQL and suddenly they are reimplementing relational DBs logic in code with NoSQL being only a pure data storage.
A bit annoying when people shove a relational DB into a NoSQL schema though.