Back to the future of databases by Yin Wang.
From the post:
Why do we need databases? What a stupid question. I already heard some people say. But it is a legitimate question, and here is an answer that not many people know.
First of all, why can’t we just write programs that operate on objects? The answer is, obviously, we don’t have enough memory to hold all the data. But why can’t we just swap out the objects to disk and load them back when needed? The answer is yes we can, but not in Unix, because Unix manages memory as pages, not as objects. There are systems who lived before Unix that manage memory as objects, and perform object-granularity persistence. That is a feature ahead of its time, and is until today far more advanced than the current state-of-the-art. Here are some pictures of such systems:
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Certainly thought provoking but how much of an advantage would object-granularity persistence have to offer before it could make headway against the install base of Unix?
The database field is certainly undergoing rapid research and development, with no clear path to a winner.
Will the same happen with OSes?