Relational Databases: Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Natural for the vast majority of applications: The relational model of storing data in tables is intuitive and maps well to many real-world scenarios.
• Numerous tools for managing and querying: There is a rich ecosystem of tools for interacting with relational databases.

Cons:

• Not well-suited to some data: Data like networks or unstructured text can be difficult to model in a relational database.
• Fixed schema: The schema (the structure of the tables and columns) is rigid. Adding new columns can be a difficult process.
• Expensive to maintain when data gets large: Relational databases can become expensive to maintain when the amount of data grows into the terabyte range.