hubs about Relational Databases to In earth-shattering news, Ryan Park has revealed that CouchDB is not a relational database, and therefore may not behave like a relational database. Glad we got that out of the way. In more important news: ......

[Sriram] My complaint was that the perspective is one filtered through the lens of RDBMS attributes. An RDBMS is great for certain applications, most especially those whose data set’s natural shape is rectangular, and which contain a paucity of information within the relations. Once those relations become critical, or the data set shifts and morphs shapes, the traditional RDBMS collapses into a crying heap on the floor, and those “benefits” become an albatross.

The end point is that it’s important to understand a multitude of tools and realize that strengths and weaknesses are relative to the perspective you have and the application you envision.

Just to pick one example, take his example of an aggregation function. Now you either have to incure the perf hit of retrieving all entities or you have to do extra calculation at create/update time – both slower than what an RDBMS would give you.