Slashdot | Why Is Data Mining Still A Frontier?

Slashdot | Why Is Data Mining Still A Frontier?: "Scientific (and other) data is still housed in unrelated collections, waiting for some enterprising Relational Database Programmer to unlock the keys to understanding. Is RDBMS still a Brave New Frontier, or will Google make the art obsolete once they finish indexing everything?"

This is what occasioned my finally re-finding the metafilter question below – I work with social scientists who, because of their statistical training and general worldview, call rectangular tables "databases" all the time (god that irks me..) and to whom I've had to (try to) explain why relational data structures are good both theoretically (shifting of unit of analysis, forces explicit decisions at query-writing time) and practically (allows collection of data that you'd like to be able to use in the future but collection cost is high).