The last decade saw an explosion of web applications and mobile devices resulting in overwhelming volumes of data. Traditional database designs from 30 years ago have not kept pace and cannot scale to handle these large data sets and concurrent workloads. This has tempted some developers to throw away the relational database and build on one of the NoSQL data stores that seem easier to code with and promise to scale. But for most business applications the data is relational! Transactions and consistency matter! And so begins the journey to reinvent relational capabilities in many applications built on top of a NoSQL data store.
What if there was a way to scale a relational, ACID-compliant database with no limits, one that offered not only SQL access, but also a JSON document interface that was able to take advantage of the underlying relational schema?