The connection I see is the attempt to make the syntax English-like. Expressions like "SELECT * FROM users" remind me of COBOL's "ADD X TO Y".
I'm not by any means saying that the NoSQL movement as a whole is a fad - there's good motivations behind some of these products - but a lot of people who are just ignorant also seem to have hopped onto the bandwagon.
Rather, I think the author has confused "relational" with a lot of other properties of relational databased management systems - such as transactions and data integrity guarantees.
> Like "power steering" for SQL. Doesn't teach you how to drive!
for foo in bar
What would you prefer? Fortran? Assembly?
My primary point was just that SQL is old, and I think the reason it is the way it is has more to do with history and compatibility than what we'd want it to look like if we started from scratch today.
SQL is still around because it was successful. And there are reasons to value compatibility, and to avoid changing things for no reason. But my personal experience using a database without using SQL was pleasant, and I'm anxious to see the world move on to something new and improved.
But beyond very simple cases I feel like non-SQL query interfaces very quickly become terrible, clumsy, leaky abstractions.
I usually try to have the best of both worlds - I create a SQL view/function/sproc containing my big gross gnarly joins, and then query it in a pretty way via the ORM.
Unlike COBOL (which I admit to not being very familiar with) SQL uses standard mathematical symbols as operators whenever possible... + instead of "ADD" etc.
select * from users