The Future Database
I can&#x27;t make sense of lots of this.<p>- Without self-replicating grey goo, infinite scalability is surely more a property of some kind of networked computer rental business (like AWS) rather than a database.<p>- What does &#x27;serverless&#x27; mean exactly? My understanding is that it denotes a stateless application which is executed to serve a request but doesn&#x27;t run continually as a daemon. Essentially the aforementioned computer rental business provides the event loop and the program provides the event handler. I fail to see how this is compatible with a database, which is definitionally <i>very</i> stateful. (And that encompasses much, <i>much</i> more than just the data.)<p>- &#x27;Intelligence&#x27;: Databases already <i>are</i> intelligent and self-optimising, and have been at least since MySQL&#x2F;Postgres: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.mysql.com&#x2F;doc&#x2F;refman&#x2F;8.0&#x2F;en&#x2F;cost-model.html#cost-model-operation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dev.mysql.com&#x2F;doc&#x2F;refman&#x2F;8.0&#x2F;en&#x2F;cost-model.html#cost...</a><p>- &#x27;Fundamentally reliable&#x27;: This idea could reasonably be described as, uh, &#x27;not novel&#x27;.<p>- &#x27;Distributed globally, locally available&#x27;: As far as I can tell, this collection of words is entirely devoid of any meaning. It sounds like it came out of a random passphrase generator.<p>- &#x27;Scale should not come at the cost of performance&#x27;. While technically semantically meaningful, this is not novel or interesting, and I&#x27;m pretty sure this has been a pleasant daydream for database designers since databases were stored in punchcards. As far as I can see, this is comparable to saying &#x27;houses should not come at the cost of money&#x27;.<p>This feels more like a laundry list of daydreams rather than a meaningful narrowing-down of how future databases will be architected. &quot;It should be infinitely scalable, usable by a toaster, and it shouldn&#x27;t need a computer to live on. It should be serverless and stateless but also self-optimising and with connection pooling. It should be consistent, available, and, uh, partitions, it should be cool with those too. It should be usable by anyone and perfectly tailored to their needs as well as to the opposite needs. Also...&quot;