Think of building websites as engineering composite materials. A composite material is when two or more materials are combined to create a third material that does something useful that the components couldn't do on their own. Composites like reinforced concrete have revolutionized design and construction. When building websites we usually bring different component materials together, like creating a composite, to get the features we need rather than building a completely new thing from scratch that does everything we want.

This approach has been seen as a hack because it leads to inelegancies like data duplication; great gobs of component glue; consistency issues; and messy operations. But what if the the composite approach is really a strength, not a hack, but a messy part of the world that needs to be embraced rather than belittled?

They key is to see data as a material. Right now we are arguing which is the best single material to build with. Is it NoSQL, relational, massively parallel, graph,  in-memory, or something else entirely? It all seems a bit crazy. Each material has both limits and capabilities. What we need to think of building is a composite material that combines the best characteristics of what is available into something better.