Databases were traditionally highly specialized data stores that were designed for specific tasks and until recently, they’ve been getting even more specialized. Recall data warehouses? Somebody once quipped to us that they were “bug fixes” for the shortcomings of transaction databases for handling more data-intensive analytics, query, and reporting. But after Y2K, SQL relational databases were supposedly the de facto enterprise standard until they got broken by weblog traffic coming from Internet applications. And from all that came NoSQL databases for handling operational use cases, like maintaining online user profiles or product catalogs, and big data stores like Hadoop for handling those ugly multi-terabyte and petabyte jobs.
