Do not anger the RDBMS True Believers

When Jeff Atwood's latest article Maybe Normalizing Isn't Normal crossed my desk I knew what the reaction would be and recorded it in del.icio.us:

Expect the relational database zealots to crawl out of the woodwork on this one. Comments will include, "you suck", "use postgres", this article is harmful", and "I used to think you were smart Jeff..."

It's 24 hours later, how did I do?

you suck

This is why this article is wrong, Jeff. This is why you're an idiot, in case the first statement wasn't clear enough.

use postgres

And from the short glimpse I did at the article about performance of tag systems it seems they tested only on MySQL. Not exactly a database one connects with good performance on complex queries -- it's extremely fast on flat data, but to my (not utterly up-to-date) knowledge they never managed to catch up with Postgres or the commercial RDBMS' on anything reasonably complex.

this article is harmful

I appreciate your post, but it's very wrong, and harmful advice to an inexperienced programmer.

I used to think you were smart Jeff...

This one is a miss on my part, no one actually said this, they jumped straight to calling him an idiot.

For some perspective watch Richard Dawkin's TED Talk, The universe is queerer than we can suppose, the point of which is that when you move to different scales, and I mean really different scales, the rules change.