I continue to think the trend towards treating the RDBMS as a dumb indexed filesystem is rather ridiculous.
I couldn’t agree more — while an RDBMS is certainly not applicable in every situation, I believe that in >95% of all cases other options are simply not worth the hassle.
Indeed, most people seem to have forgotten why the relational model “won” over network and hierarchical databases. Or perhaps they never bothered to find out in the first place.
I find a dreadful lack of understanding about data design (whether relational or otherwise) in the industry today. Just don’t get me started on some of the nonsense designs or ridiculous SQL that developers seem to come up with!
Hopefully, the current debate over M/R will cause at least some people to revisit our history and actually learn something. Who knows, we might even make some progress…