What I meant was that, as far as I have seen, the tools that try to replace SQL by some OO intermediary, give you poorer abstractions that limit what you can do. SQL seems clunky, but I think the core is quite well done considering when it comes from.
OTOH a relational relational database doesn't fit all needs. They scale pretty well, but when you get to gigantic data sets, they don't do so well and things like map reduce do a better job. Or cases where you are streaming massive amounts of data and you need performance, not ACID transaction reliability. Actually, we are more in agreement than disagreement.
There isn't a good massively parallel open source SQL implementation right now, but that is just a matter of engineering -- SQL databases have been shown to scale to massive data volumes (e.g. Fox Interactive have ~200 TB of user data in Greenplum, which is a parallel DB based on Postgres).
OTOH a relational relational database doesn't fit all needs. They scale pretty well, but when you get to gigantic data sets, they don't do so well and things like map reduce do a better job. Or cases where you are streaming massive amounts of data and you need performance, not ACID transaction reliability. Actually, we are more in agreement than disagreement.