another situation that makes the choice easier is when you want to use aggregate function like sum, min, max, etcetera and complex queries (like in the financial system mentioned above) then a relational database is probably more convenient then a nosql database since both are not possible on a nosql databse unless you use really a lot of Inverted indexes. When you do use nosql you would have to do the aggregate functions in code or store them seperatly in its own columnfamily but this makes it all quite complex and reduces the performance that you gained by using nosql.