That's not complaining about the relational model at all, he's complaining about implementation details of common RDBMSes being obsolete, as they're based on row-oriented storage, slow disks, small memory, and limited concurrency.

Things like Amazon Redshift are still relational but make radically different decisions on most of those points.

Edit: that talk is well worth reading, btw. I wonder why he completely ignores flash though?

Actually the title is "The Traditional RDBMS Wisdom is All Wrong".

He's arguing against multithreaded systems in favour of a partitioned OLTP platform like H-Store (VoltDB). I didn't see anything about the relational model being "all wrong". It works well for lots of scenarios, and turning it into a KV store is also straightforward.

As far as SQL, I think people agree it's not the best query language. QUEL may have won, but Stonebraker says[1]: "The only reason SQL won in the marketplace was because IBM released DB2 in 1984 without changing the System R query language."

1: http://iggyfernandez.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/nocoug-journal...

Thanks for linking to that talk, it deserves a submission all of its own.

Absolutely. Very interesting talk. Definitely deserves a submission.

BTW, the person asking the last couple of questions is Ed Bugnion, one of the co-founders of VMWare. He is a faculty now at EPFL.

Interesting, I didn't know that!

I actually submitted it, but it didn't get too much traction...