Yea, I knew the post would be vacuous when I hit "tyranny", but I guess the flourishes makes good HN bait to speak in sweeping terms like that. There's little about on-disk consistency and data loss risks, scale characteristics yet there's coverage of the wire protocol? Meh. Sure, I'm glad to have a lot of these tools available, the bad old days of rolling your stuff with Berkeley DB or NDBM seem safely behind us but the reality is that there are many classes of problems for which SQL is still and will remain the most sensible solution. Get over it.

I also don't understand the 15 years figure either, is that a reference to when MySQL was initially released? I hope the original poster understands that SQL is older than that.