(cross-posting from here ) OK, I admit it, declaring that " the RDBMS is dead " is a meme that has been going around the software industry for a while. Remember object-oriented data bases that were supposed to replace the relational ones? Well, guess who is still here. However, despite the RDBMS's amazing survival skills I would like to propose a related prediction: I believe that the year 2009 will go down in history as the year when the " relational model default " ended. The term "relational model default" was coined by me to describe a peculiar thing that goes on in application development: start talking to your average application developer about some arbitrary business requirement and chances are that simultaneously he mentally constructs a relational model to fit those requirements. That relational approach to modeling your problem may or may not be suitable. The real problem is that all too often this default does not get challenged. As a conse
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