I'm always a little confused that people seem desperate to use the wrong tool, and then blame the tool. If you need to store normalized data and maintain integrety -- you'll end up with the equivalent of an SQL datastore (or, more likely a system that is faster, but subtly broken).
Sure, it's difficult to scale ACID. But if what you need is a way to serialize objects, you'll probably be better off with something like Gemstone/GLASS, a document store or some other kind of object database?
If your problem domain actually fits working with structured data, then using an SQL system makes a lot of sense. The obvious example for "web scale" here is Stackoverflow. Sure their architecture has grown a little since it was 2xIIS+2xSQL Server -- but they got pretty far on just that.
Sure, it's difficult to scale ACID. But if what you need is a way to serialize objects, you'll probably be better off with something like Gemstone/GLASS, a document store or some other kind of object database?
If your problem domain actually fits working with structured data, then using an SQL system makes a lot of sense. The obvious example for "web scale" here is Stackoverflow. Sure their architecture has grown a little since it was 2xIIS+2xSQL Server -- but they got pretty far on just that.