I think a lot of the frustration with relational databases in general comes from a misunderstanding.
People conflate "relational" with "SQL", because of the historical accident that SQL is the most popular way to query relational data. Then when SQL isn't a good fit for their problem, they think relational is not a good fit for their problem, which is almost certainly not true.
The original motivation for relational databases is to have path-independent access to data. This is a really powerful idea.
What I think we really need are better APIs around relational data access that embrace real relational semantics, instead of dumping them in favor of an object graph at the first opportunity (which throws away the path-independent access).
People conflate "relational" with "SQL", because of the historical accident that SQL is the most popular way to query relational data. Then when SQL isn't a good fit for their problem, they think relational is not a good fit for their problem, which is almost certainly not true.
The original motivation for relational databases is to have path-independent access to data. This is a really powerful idea.
What I think we really need are better APIs around relational data access that embrace real relational semantics, instead of dumping them in favor of an object graph at the first opportunity (which throws away the path-independent access).