But I don’t understand the people who act like Postgres is the end of everything. SQL never felt right for me either. It’s a fine language for business analysis, I guess, but is it actually pleasant for development? Do all of you who so enthusiastically post that it should be the first tool you reach for really never experience object-relational impedance? Do you really enjoy modeling like this?
A really big thing is normalization which some people tend to downplay until they’ve had to write code to recurse complex structures enforcing consistency or making global changes. Similarly, atomicity and isolation are really useful characteristics to be able to take for granted without having to code around the problem everywhere.
The usual arc I've seen for document stores, ISAMs, etc. is that people say this is great based on the first 20 minutes and then about a year later realize that they've spent thousands of lines of code implementing a really clunky subset of what they'd get out of the box with a SQL database and the believed ease of use or performance benefits were far less dramatic than promised or even negative.
The real win for me is once you're doing anything more than just loading an object: once you need to do any sort of reporting, filtering, querying, etc. I appreciate the effort spent on normalization.