The End of an Architectural Era

I picked up via this post on the High Scalability Blog a new paper by Michael Stonebraker, Nabil Hachem, and Pat Helland entitled The End of an Era (It's Time for a Complete Rewrite) presented at the VLDB 2007 conference in Austria on September 23rd through 27th.

From the paper's summary:

As you know, I'm a big believer in the special-purpose DBMS meme.  Any database historian knows what Codd was thinking, and more importantly -- what he wasn't -- when he designed the relational model.  Again, from the paper:

"Ted Codd’s idea of normalizing data into flat tables has served our community well over the subsequent 30 years.  However, there are now other markets, whose needs must be considered.  These include data warehouses, web-oriented search, real-time analytics, and semi-structured data markets."

The complete paper can be found here.