I also want to take a moment to acknowledge the NoSQL movement. I just ran across this SQL and NoSQL article by David Intersimone (who I met at Borland many years ago), where he gives a nice history of traditional SQL products and tools, and also talks about the NoSQL movement, and the factors spurring on the need for non-SQL databases (data stores).
For the record, David I is now an evangelist for Embarcadero. He's a very interesting person, and I really like his "Programming is Life" mantra, which he shares at the end of that article.
