You don't have to pump any water in conventional locks - you rely on having a source of water (lake) higher than the top lock.

The wheel is quicker than a series of locks (not important for leisure use) more expensive to build but it's probably cheaper to maintain than 20 locks.

The wheel still uses energy from the water source to lift the craft. The real advantage is it takes far less water while looking cool. It’s also tall for a lock.

I think the most efficient system to build and use would be a "bucket" and pulley’s attacked to a counter weight. Granted it would have far less summitry and not look as cool. The main advantage to locks is they scale really well but they use more water.

PS: I can't help but wonder how they counterbalance the buoyancy when one end dips into the water. Those curved tips might help and I can world out the geometry in my head but I think they just brute force it.

I don't think any of it dips into the water. It looks like there's a dug out portion for the wheel to turn into.

Thanks, I just noticed that the edges where not wet in the pictures so I think you are correct.

Probably not for most people. Might be useful for receptionists in a public area. Useful if you can make it a requirement for eg. nurses stations in a hospital.

A version built in to ATMs would be good.

Not all data is relational and not all data fits into records.

examples?

Trees, Pictures, Classes, Anything that varies on a per instance basis and can't be easily shoved into a fixed schema. There are plenty of things relational database suck at, are you implying otherwise?

>The reason PostgreSQL et al have those features is because people want them.

The reason those features are in PostgresSQL is because they are in SQLserver, ... because they are in Oracle, ... because they are in DB2.

Based on that logic C should have had a report generator and the unix filesystem should have records - and your car would have a saddle and whip holder.

No, it has those features because it aims to be SQL standard compliant, as do those other RDBMSes.

Where is the Standard for these 'Document-oriented' DBs?

Only those cheap imports don't have whip holders.

Otherwise, your contention in-domain feature copying somehow translates to cross-domain feature transfer is something that I fail to understand. Can you explain it better?

Postgress has certain features because it is competing, both technically and in marketing check-boxes, with other SQL databases. CouchDB is not an SQL DB (and not even an RDMS) and so doesn't automatically have to have the same rich set of features.