watfiv

I believe his account is somewhat outdated: when you search for "Better Keyboard" on the Market--at least in Android 1.6--the first thing that comes up is the app. But I do remember a time when what he said was true and finding the app on the Market was difficult.

It might not be quite so solid a fact. I've worked on websites with closer to 20m visits a month, and they've been able to swing deals for slightly better CPMs. I suspect that many sites with over 100m visits would probably see advertising opportunities open up if they're aggressive enough, especially if they've been able to collect even a small amount of demographic information on their visitors. So the linear relationship is probably not definite.

Basically: more precisely, that modern database APIs (not just ORMs) can hide much of the complexity of using an sql database, so that it seems neither "elaborate" nor "a higher order of magnitude" more complex to the programmer to build, test or debug. And since modern database layers often give you tools to help build data structures, it might seem simpler to use those tools than to build something without them.

That's hardly true in all cases. Depending on the situation, the "layer of complexity" introduced by your having to build your own data structures is often far worse than whatever is introduced by using an sql database. If you're using a good ORM, it might not really be "complex" at all.

I don't mean this to argue that a db is always good, but I'd guess one of the reasons that people use a database even when it's inappropriate is precisely because it seems less complex.