Databases in 2024: A Year in Review

2024 was also the year that Realm died

Larry always makes appearances in his reviews, lol

> But the real big news in 2023 was how Elon Musk personally helped reset Larry's Twitter password after he invested $1b in Musk's takeover of the social media company. And with this $1b password reset, we were graced in October 2023 with Larry's second-ever tweet and his first new one in over a decade.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2024/01/2023-databases-re...

> These journalists made it sound like Larry was doing something nefarious or indecent, like the time he made his pregnant third wife sign a prenup two hours before their wedding. I can assure you that Larry was only trying to use his vast wealth as the 7th richest person in the world to help his country. His participation in this call is admirable and should be lauded. Free and fair elections are not a trivial affair, like a boat race where sometimes shenanigans are okay as long as you win. Larry has done other great things with his money that are overlooked, like spending $370m on anti-aging research so that he can live forever

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/blog/2022/12/2022-databases-re...

Agreed. Many noSQL-boom-era databases eventually bolted on a SQL-esque layer, but that was also because they were mostly also all targeting "enterprise database" use cases and customers who both expected that and whose use cases largely fit with it. So, there was a lot of pressure to conform to norms when the advantage of not doing so wasn't immediately self-evident.

We have a database [1] and query language [2] that's tailored to storing & querying trace/telemetry data produced by different layers and components of cyber-physical systems for systems engineers to analyze, verify, and validate what a complex system is doing. It's not quite a traditional relational problem. It's not quite a traditional time series problem. It's not quite a traditional graph problem.

Addressing the way that systems engineers think about their domain in an effective way required coming up with something different. Are there caveats and rough edges? Sure. But, they're a lot less pernicious and onerous than the alternative of trying to leverage a bunch of ill-fitting menageries of different solutions.

Redis is fit-for-purpose. So, it makes sense that its query interface would also express that.

[1] https://docs.auxon.io/modality/

[2] https://docs.auxon.io/speqtr/

This person started with news on DB - reviewing all prominent DBs & finally ended talking about love of Larry Ellison. A perfect human in the days of LLMs. Amazing write up.

A couple of spicy things:

> OtterTune. Dana, Bohan, and I worked on this research project and startup for almost a decade. And now it is dead. I am disappointed at how a particular company treated us at the end, so they are forever banned from recruiting CMU-DB students. They know who they are and what they did.

Ouch.

> Lastly, I want to give a shout-out to ByteBase for their article Database Tools in 2024: A Year in Review. In previous years, they emailed me asking for permission to translate my end-of-year database articles into Chinese for their blog. This year, they could not wait for me to finish writing this one, so they jocked my flow and wrote their own off-brand article with the same title and premise.

Also sounds like he's preparing a new company:

> I hope to announce our next start-up soon (hint: it’s about databases).