Mind you, the NoSQL community still has a lot of work to do, years and years of work, InfoGrid and many other NoSQL technologies non-withstanding.

But I remember that when I first heard about what SQL is and what it does (particularly, what it can’t do), I thought: “this can’t be true. How many billions in revenue and market cap depend on that oddity?”. That was about when SQL was only about half as old as it is now… which makes this even scarier. (Try: no recursive queries. No abstract data types. No inheritance. No (meaningful) distributedness. No … <insert many other things here>. And how many thousands of lines would you like to write on object-relational mapping today? … )

So with that hat on, I’m proud to display this image as a bumper sticker, which comes from a presentation by Tim Anglade. May SQL never come near you ;-) If it does, run!

Disclaimer: I don’t build payroll systems for a living. If I did, I might think otherwise. But I think they have all been built, and the new stuff does require thinking much more along these lines.