> I'd venture to say NoSQL has gained it's popularity because it's Magic
No, it's because to a first approximation, they aren't magic. Writing your queries in a more imperative style means that most developers can more easily reason about them, doubly so once they get more complicated.
You don't have to rely on generators or magic frameworks to generate SQL for you with a good document database. All your queries can quite reasonably be right there, and things like "get the document with the ID of foo" are already just one method call away.
Of course, most NoSQL databases have tradeoffs that are not obvious, while I believe all SQL databases stick to ACID. That's probably more of the problem than what query language is used.
> You don't have to rely on generators or magic frameworks to generate SQL for you with a good document database. All your queries can quite reasonably be right there, and things like "get the document with the ID of foo" are already just one method call away.
I guess the scenario I was thinking of was if somewhere were to sit down and learn Rails with no knowledge of programming, they don't also have to learn SQL in addition to Ruby and Rails and ERB and everything else bundled in because ActiveRecord takes care of the database for you. If they were learning Sinatra, as a comparison, they'd have to also learn some ORM-layer tool, which potentially abstracts the SQL, but may not. But if they do Mongoid or the like, then the database returns to Magic status. Change you schema? No problem.
No, it's because to a first approximation, they aren't magic. Writing your queries in a more imperative style means that most developers can more easily reason about them, doubly so once they get more complicated.
You don't have to rely on generators or magic frameworks to generate SQL for you with a good document database. All your queries can quite reasonably be right there, and things like "get the document with the ID of foo" are already just one method call away.
Of course, most NoSQL databases have tradeoffs that are not obvious, while I believe all SQL databases stick to ACID. That's probably more of the problem than what query language is used.