So, besides ACID and BASE compliance, what is the real difference between relational and non-relational databases? Essentially, we have the ability to provide roughly the same features from both of these database types: storing data, both can do that; support for transactions and scripting, yup, we can do that on both as well. It's just that the database types are better at doing one specific thing. Relational databases are better at scripting, complex transactions, table joins, and so on, whereas non-relational databases are better at storing huge datasets of simple values that we need to retrieve at very high performance rates; some non-relational databases support scripting and transactions, but they are much less efficient at it.
The biggest difference is probably in the datasets themselves. Relational databases are designed to store...