We Don't Need a "Database"

Written by a programmer who has a myopic view of how data is used. Data is not used by just one application in the real world over time; if your app that uses the stupid database becomes popular (or your startup becomes popular), you will now need many interfaces into that database - reporting, analysis, OLTP, maintenance. By putting it in a "persistence-aware programming environment" you're *&%$ing everyone else except you. Woohoo!

From the article: "What we really need is a persistence-aware programming environment"<p>This really hits home with me. I've been working on a data model for one of my projects. I'm trying to model time series data so that I can perform analysis of the data as it changes over time. I've been thinking about how best to model this using the relational model, but even after a few months I've been unable to develop a relational model that I'm happy with.<p>The more I read about MapReduce and similar methods of computation, the more I become convinced that I could model time series data and perform analysis of it with a method of computation that is more "integrated" into my data store. Essentially, I'd like to be able to use my programming language of choice (at the moment, that's ruby) to perform queries on my datastore that for one reason or another I've been unable to represent in SQL or a similar query language.

"We have persistent objects, they're called files." -- Ken Thompson.