He does at least put down Tutorial D as an alternative to SQL, which is Chris Date's relational language.

The issue is not the relational model, which is pretty simple and powerful. The issue is that SQL reflects a more complicated multi-set multi-valued logical model.

Why not indeed. Many times all that is required is a few files written to /tmp atomically mv'd in place. Also, see git's design[0] and how it makes operations like fetch/push completely trivial. Also, how redis reliably dumps and appends.

[0]: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Internals

Equally asinine: "plain old tarballs would be better than svn".

That's something Linus Torvalds has effectively said as well, so it's not as asinine as you might think. Unduly harsh perhaps.