Once upon a time, I had the pleasure of taking a graduate database course with ACM Turing Award Winner, Professor Michael Stonebraker. It was a hoot because Stonebraker was a character in a good way. He has strong opinions but expresses them with a very dry, non-confrontational, wit. Said approach exemplified by this interview, “How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come,” at The Next Platform.
The issue is the changing storage hierarchy and what it has to do with databases. Let’s start with online transaction processing. In my opinion, this is a main memory system right now, and there are a bunch of NewSQL startups that are addressing this market. An OLTP database that is 1 TB in size is a really big one, and 1 TB of main memory is no big deal any more. So I think OLTP will entirely go to main memory for anybody who cares about performance. If you don’t care about performance, then run the database on your wristwatch or whatever.
Definitely give it a read, especially the thoughts on how accelerating innovation in the networking space will affect data management. Go Bears!