Relational databases are not going anywhere

I stumbled upon this entry which argues against the existence of the RDBMS in distributed applications. I must say I disagree. The "key-value" database movement does attempt to solve some valid concerns. For instance, the complexity involved with deploying a clustered RDBMS can be daunting at best. The ease of which application developers can use these key-value databases is very powerful. I also agree with the assertion that a single schema distributed across n nodes will not be able to scale very easily.

However, at a lower level, there is still no substitute for the RDBMS when it comes to reading and writing persistent data. I often sense a stereotype among developers toward RDBMSes as being a bloated overhead. Again, I disagree. There exist several open source, lightweight RDBMSes that add zero or very little additional effort.

On the schema end of things, they are only fixed at the data level. The application can easily abstract new and dynamic shemas during its' lifetime.

I think several of the new "key-value" database concepts (such has the document abstraction) belong in the application or server layer, not the data layer. As far as nodes in the cloud, each node will benefit from an RDBMS for the foreseeable future.