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A really fascinating paper bolstering many of the anti-RDBMS threads the have popped up on the intertube lately. The spirit of the paper is found in the following excerpt: In summary, the current RDBMSs were architected for the business data processing market in a time of different user interfaces and different hardware characteristics. Hence, they all include the following System R architectural features: * Disk oriented storage and indexing structures * Multithreading to hide latency * Locking-based concurrency control mechanisms * Log-based recovery Of course, there have been some extensions over the years, including support for compression, shared-disk architectures, bitmap indexes, support for user-defined data types and operators, etc. However, no system has had a complete redesign since its inception. This paper argues that the time has come for a complete rewrite.