like the yesterday's submission of "Why you should never use MongoDB (2013)" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12290739 ), this is all just plain sad because totally unnecessary: the failure of hierarchical databases was obvious in 1960s and was the background of Edgar F. Codd's work on the relational model. unfortunately, this industry is dominated by cocky PFYs (of any age) convinced they don't need to study h…
To be fair, though, it is genuinely difficult to gauge which technologies are worth adopting. Clearly some are, otherwise we'd all still be writing hand-crafted assembler to optimize drum memory I/O, or perhaps heaps of Perl CGI scripts.
It's also unrealistic to expect the average programmer - hell, even the pretty good programmer - to be aware of 50+ years of relevant research. For starters, many of them can't even access the relevant papers without paying some gatekeeper a whole lot for the privilege. If they could, they'd need a significant investment of time to understand them, especially without ready access to domain experts who can tell them which papers are most worth reading and in which order. (All of these are benefits of graduate student life that are often taken for granted.)