This particular article is addressing problems that would not be trivial in an RDBMS. If you're worried about concurrency when incrementing a counter, you're at a level of scale few people get to work on.
There's a legitimate rant to be had about using elephant architecture to serve mouse traffic, and I think that's what annoys me most about the NoSQL fad. But that doesn't mean the problems mentioned in this article don't exist.
"If you're worried about concurrency when incrementing a counter, you're at a level of scale few people get to work on."
I'm not sure I understand. If I make an application that has to increment a counter, shouldn't I always be worried about concurrency?
What I mean is, sure, if I'm serving only a few requests, then of course the probability of running into concurrency issues is lower than a site with more requests/sec. But it's still a matter of chance, there is some probability that two requests will come in at exactly the same time and cause a problem.
You are worrying about correctness of concurrency. Yes, this should always be worried about.
The parent poster is worrying about performance of concurrency. This doesn't need to be worried about unless you are one of about 5-10 tech companies whose name is recognisable to people on the street.
I think we are on the same page. In this particular article I was referring to the paragraph regarding paging results which is ancillary to the main point.
There's a legitimate rant to be had about using elephant architecture to serve mouse traffic, and I think that's what annoys me most about the NoSQL fad. But that doesn't mean the problems mentioned in this article don't exist.