This recent hype about the NoSQL stuff was only possible because there was a name :)
Yet it may be coincidental but that seemed to coincide with the time that using an XMLHTTPRequest took off.
Maybe the branding worked?
Still there is something "magic" in this process. Once you get a name for one thing, it starts to get much more obvious. For instance think at the "web 2.0" or "Ajax" cases. NoSQL, in the name itself, is the negation of something else, and this allowed to collect a number of different projects under this name.
The appropriate words here are "logical" and "physical" not "real" and "unreal". A relation is a logical data structure. Hash tables, trees, and graphs are all physical data structures.
Another accurate thing to say is that hash tables, trees and graphs are all "pointer-based databases" and relational databases are "pointer-free databases".
The second one will be confusing to people accustomed to putting pointers into relations (like what rails does) and turning the relational database into an ad-hoc graph database.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogate_key
"For example, table Staff may contain two rows for "John Smith", one row when he was employed between 1990 and 1999, another row when he was employed between 2001 and 2006. The surrogate key is identical (non-unique) in both rows however the primary key will be unique."
It's like calling FreeBSD 'NoNT' or Linux 'NoWindows'. Just because SQL is what people are used to using for persistence doesn't make this a good name for an alternative style.