Hey thanks for liking the article (I'm the author)

It seems maybe some of the NewSQL stuff is doing this. You use "SQL" but the data is still organized by some kind of hierarchy (like in F5). I'm trying to get into Google's Dremel paper to learn more about how they do it.

In general, though, it seems if there's any chance something might be normalized, but behind the scenes maybe its actually denormalized a bit, then folks try to layer on some kind of SQL-likeness to the database.