The disclosure at the bottom is laughable. It should read, "Michael Stonebraker has a strong economic incentive to steer enterprises away from NoSQL. Whenever a company chooses NoSQL, he will lose money. Hence, his opinions should be considered in this light." Oh, and full disclosure, I have a strong economic interest in promoting NoSQL.
As somebody who knows Mike Stonebraker and works for one of his RDBMS companies, I can honestly say he says this stuff because he really believes that NoSQL is history repeating itself.
Whether it's hierarchical databases, XML databases, objective databases, proprietary query languages, etc..., people keep trying new things and then coming back to the relational model and SQL. When people say "This time it's different", he gets annoyed. Maybe this time he's wrong, but with an understanding of the history of databases, it's easy for me to see his point of view.
Honestly, I'm not sure if antagonizing the NoSQL community helps his companies or not. The NoSQL crowd is pretty passionate.
Not sure why this is being downmodded. Stonebraker has a history of using his reputation to promote his businesses. Which is fine, but I don't think most people realize how much of a financial interest he has in downplaying nosql. Something his competitors like ahoff and I are very much aware of. :)
It's a bit over the top: "Whenever a company chooses NoSQL, he will lose money." - it's not like Stonebraker gets money every time someone sets up Mysql, or even Postgresql, which, IIRC, he was involved with at some early point in its history.
I'll admit it was a bit snarky, and written in haste. You said it much better. He wants to play the role of an objective observer here, almost like an expert journalist. But he definitely has skin in the game.
I don't mind that Stonebraker has a conflict of interest. He's marketing, I get it. I do mind that ACM has given him the platform to do it. Any other ACM publication would consider it incredibly unethical to publish articles with such clear conflicts.
