To be fair to the author of the email, he didn't entirely assume his approach was the only good one, since he did suggest: "either use the data, and structure your data (at that layer) to take advantage of it, or don't use a database." e.g. if what you want is to persist objects, then use something other than a relational database. Perhaps one problem is that most programming environments don't have an obvious choice for this so MySQL or equivalent just jumps out as being the ideal candidate. A very brief amount of googling for various permutations of "scalable object store" or "object oriented database" didn't seem to return anything useful. I use Erlang which has an integrated DBMS that can store arbitrarily complex types without marshalling. Are there some equivalents on other platforms?