"Scaling practices turn a relational database into a non-relational database."
When will people learn that the 'relation' in relational database comes from the correspondence between database tables and the mathematical notion of relations, not the ability to describe relationships between tables? Unless scaling practices make a relational database stop using tables, the database still being used as a relational database.
While you're technically correct, language does evolve and if 90% of developers think relational means foreign keys and normals forms then that's what it means. Words are used to communicate and sometimes get misused and take on a new meaning; that's just the way it goes. I've met very few developers or database guys who know that a relation comes from the relational algebra and has nothing to do with foreign keys or normals forms.
When will people learn that the 'relation' in relational database comes from the correspondence between database tables and the mathematical notion of relations, not the ability to describe relationships between tables? Unless scaling practices make a relational database stop using tables, the database still being used as a relational database.