SQL gives some people the howling fantods. I think a large part of the programming-nerd population looks at it and sees it as a kludgy chimera like JCL, or an inscrutably unfunny INTERCAL variant. Maybe they've been forced to use a shitty ORM leaked abstractions on a project of theirs which they had to clean up; maybe someone slipped them the hot SQL injection, back in the days of CGI; maybe their parents were tragically trampled to death by an elephant while a nearby dolphin laughed. Regardless of motiation, you have to concede to whom it riles that SQL is not the most likeable language/model/framework/paradigm out there.

Personally, I actually love SQL. You asked me, nothing satisfies like nested right inner joins. But that's not who I am. I have needs. Sometimes, what I need is a schemaless eventually-consistent document-oriented persistent data store, because I am aggregating data from multiple web service APIs whose field names and structures change around like they were samples on a Girl Talk record. CouchDB ain't SlouchDB... I can dance to that.

I can tell that some of my buddies are embracing databases from the ranks of the quote-unquote NoSQL movement because these databases' aesthetics are not at all like SQL. That's the catch with NoSQL -- it's a really pointless thing to talk about because it's not a thing; it is an un-thing, a classification of everything in the contemporary database world that is not SQL. It's the kind of classification that makes the most sense in the emotional context of how people feel about SQL.