Paper: The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)

Very interesting paper entitled “The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)” (by way of the High Scalability weblog) comparing traditional RDBMSs (based on System R) with a newer system called H-Store.

Once you get by the sensational title, the paper does a good job of arguing that traditional RDBMSs (read ‘currently shipping from major vendors’) have not evolved to keep up with both the changing hardware and research landscape. It is hard to disagree with this, I was using Sybase SQL Server in 1989 on a Sun Sparcserver 490 and while some things have changed since then, it is surprising how many things are still the same.

But the article fails to answer a very important question for me: If the traditional RDBMSs are truely that poor, why are so many people using them?