Future of Relational Database

I read an interesting article on RWW about future of relational database; thought it might be of interest to you too!

This article talks about the emerging database (key/value database) and compares it to RDBMS. One of the interesting things being that you may not be able to perform JOIN operation. It is being described as the suitable model for cloud service provides (and pay-as-you-go service providers) and big players like Amazon (SimpleDB), Google (AppEngine Datastore), Microsoft (SQL Data services) have already started the offering. There are non-cloud providers too like - CouchDB, Drizzle, Mongo etc. However, all these services (both cloud and non-cloud) are still in beta or alpha phase.

My 2 cents - Personally, I think these emerging database models have a long way to go before then can match feature richness of RDBMS; Scalability can not be the only criteria as described in RWW article. With RDBMS like Oracle adopting to cloud, it can get tougher for key/value database models.

Pour in your thoughts...