Facebook's and Google's challenges are not unicorns. But they are leviathans, and the author is somewhat correct to observe that NoSQL solves problems that we all "would love to have".
Or perhaps only think we have - I know a lot of developers who believe that an RDBMS should be kept at arm's length and only spoken to through an ORM, or who've never spent much time exploring what they're missing by never straying far from SQLite and MySql. These same folks seem to have a remarkable ability run into "big data" problems that "can't be solved by an ACID-compliant RDBMS" well short of the point where I'd only be thinking, "Huh, this DB's getting big enough that I might need to spend more time thinking about my indexing strategy."
I do agree wholeheartedly that more and more companies will be encountering situations where ACID proves to be a impediment to scalability in the future. But that's then, this is now, premature optimization is the root of all evil, and "Getting ready for a problem we might encounter in the coming years" is often just a fancy way of saying, "Solving a problem we don't actually have."
Or perhaps only think we have - I know a lot of developers who believe that an RDBMS should be kept at arm's length and only spoken to through an ORM, or who've never spent much time exploring what they're missing by never straying far from SQLite and MySql. These same folks seem to have a remarkable ability run into "big data" problems that "can't be solved by an ACID-compliant RDBMS" well short of the point where I'd only be thinking, "Huh, this DB's getting big enough that I might need to spend more time thinking about my indexing strategy."
I do agree wholeheartedly that more and more companies will be encountering situations where ACID proves to be a impediment to scalability in the future. But that's then, this is now, premature optimization is the root of all evil, and "Getting ready for a problem we might encounter in the coming years" is often just a fancy way of saying, "Solving a problem we don't actually have."