There are systems like playORM that can now do joins within partitions so it is more and more likely that noSQL can replace SQL systems in the future. In fact, playORM uses S-SQL(Scalable SQL) and you do nearly the same SQL as before except specify the partitions you are querying. As a start, you can move a relational model to noSQL using playORM with no partitioning and it will be just as fast and hten you can aadd partitioning to your relational model so that it scales.
