Practice · 2009–2019 · Cloud Scale
NoSQL for Everything
Schema-optional databases sold as a lifestyle. Right tool for some jobs; default for none.
NoSQL-everywhere failed because ACID and joins are business requirements wearing a schema. Teams paid twice: once to skip migrations, again to rebuild them in services. The fad was confusing Facebook's problem with yours.
Cost of the fad
Startups ditched Postgres for document stores "because scale," then rebuilt relational integrity in application code — and paid twice when joins came back as a product requirement.
Case studies
Patterns
Context
Split everything, then pay for the glue
Hyperscale patterns escaped the companies that needed them. Containers unified packaging; Kubernetes became the cloud OS; microservices and NoSQL were sold as defaults. Mobile-first stuck because screens changed. Cargo-cult distributed systems stuck around as invoices. The durable move was packaging and ops maturity — not rewriting every app into a mesh.
Compare with
Related
Platform · 1974–now
SQL / Relational
Declarative data that outlived every ORM fashion cycle. Postgres and friends keep winning by being boring.
Platform · 2009–now
MongoDB
Document DB that became a punchline, then a grown-up product. Survived by getting serious about transactions and ops.
Platform · 2010–now
Elasticsearch
Full-text search and log analytics at scale. Powerful, hungry, and everywhere in observability stacks.