Nosql databases excel at simple lookups and gets by ID, rather than trying to sort and join pretty much ad hoc.
Ex Mongo sorts just fine, and can optimize sorting with indexes.
So decades of PHP+MySQL and Rails+PostgreSQL were simply misguided?
To the extent that transactions were the point, yes (though there may not have been many alternatvies for a datastore to use when Rails was getting started).
In the case of PHP+MySQL of course MySQL transactions were disabled by default in that era (up until 2010 in fact).
After all, what do you do when a transaction fails? Most webapps either retry or fail (if they even bother to handle that case at all), but you don't need transactions to do either of those. In an actual database application you can tell the user their transaction didn't commit and ask them to deal with it, but again you can't really do that over the HTTP request/response cycle (because what if the user submits the form and walks away? They expect their input to be saved, whatever happens on your backend).
But the above instance sounds like a variant of the "because, bwah, SQL is hard" line of thought that seems to have powered much of the (now historical) NoSQL boom.
x/|x|
Ya know, like normalizing a vector. Of course this brief confusion doesn't matter, I sort it out quickly, and it is totally clear language to other database people -- it is just a funny quirk of overloaded lingo.
But I wonder if as big data and machine learning folks (since there's some overlap with Linear Algebra there) ever get their lingo mixed up.
"To predict where the ridesharing customers will want to go, we will apply the taxicab norm to our database."
I would also point out that normalization within mathematics does not have a single concrete definition either, and it depends on your domain and desired property to stabilize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_(statistics)