"Slacker DBs" Vs. Old-Guard DBs
A very interesting summary at Slashdot - "Slacker DBs" Vs. Old-Guard DBs on an InfoWorld article Test Center: Slacker databases break all the old rules
I saw this problem from a different perspective in 2000 or so when I purchased my Palm Vx. I was taken aback to only see room for exactly five phone numbers and/or email addresses. But when I thought about it I realized that was a reasonable limitation given that the concept of Joins almost certainly isn't built into the Palm OS and program. I quite liked the Palm desktop interface and so that's where I entered much of my information.
A while later my sister purchased a Palm but was using the contact manager built into Outlook. She occasionally had more than the five contact means in Outlook and was rather ticked that the sixth or seventh wouldn't import.
But getting back to cloud computing.
Microsoft is joining the cloud as well with SQL Server under the name Microsoft SQL Data Services as part of the Azure Services Platform. This is a good thing as I really, really like relational data systems. With all the other utilities and safeguards available when MS comes at this problem from the SQL Server perspective.
The perspective that folks with no relational database experience bring rather concerns me.
An example of this is MS bringing in Dave Cutler to lead the Windows NT 3.1 team with their multi user, multi tasking experience. The DOS based folks at MS would've stumbled badly and, in my not so humble opinion, could've done a better job in the Windows 95, 98 and ME family.
For example, formatting a floppy in Windows 95/98 or ME took over the entire system. You couldn't do anything else. And yet within OS/2, a true multi tasking system, you didn't notice a floppy being formatted and the task manager showed it only took a few percentages of the CPU.
That all said I can understand why Facebook or other huge non critical sites with hundreds of millions of records would deliberately denormalize their data. For example denormalizing the contact info or website's would drastically reduce CPU and disk access times thus improving response times.
On the fourth hand all my apps are going to be properly normalized!