Desktop guys need persistence too

Joshua Marinacci makes a pretty strong statement in today's feature article:

However, the sad fact of client software today is that as every application gets bigger, it eventually needs a database. From the largest billing system to something as simple as an address book, almost every application needs a database

Thing is, he's probably right. Productivity apps, loosely defined as those where your data is more valuable than what (if any) the application provides, are often well-served by having a database to sort, search, and organize your data. A database is critical to for wrangling thouands (or tens of thousands) of songs in an MP3 player, and when I look at how iChat has saved all my instant-messaging sessions in separate files -- 3,800 of them now -- it occurs to me that this app would be well served by a database to organize all those old conversations.

Thing is, most desktop developers don't get a lot of face-time with an SQL command-line and many aren't enthusiastic about working with databases. Says Josh:

I've been a professional software engineer for close to ten years now and I don't know anything about databases. Sure, I can write a simple SELECT call, but if you ask me to do an double outer join with foreign keys or convert my schema to 18th normal form, I'll simply get lost and give up. I don't know databases. In fact, I hate databases. I'm a client guy. To me, a database is simply a box to store stuff. I don't know how they work and I don't want to know.