>> Maybe because - you know - the old database technologies are already 
>> well-understood?
> 
> I think it's more that they're already well-approved. :-)

Isn't that why nobody uses functional programming? Because it's not yet 
well-approved?

> Yep. Except there, it actually has practical implications. Lots of 
> people have binary Intel software they need to run. If you're moving to 
> a non-relational database, enforcing the ACID properties aren't 
> necessarily an important thing.
> 
> For example, is it actually important that every search on the same 
> keywords on Google invariable return the same result? Is it OK to update 
> the UK indecies an hour later than the US indecies when new web pages 
> show up?

On the other hand, if Google's entire database vanished... would they 
care? I mean, in a day or two they can re-index all the pages and 
they'll have their data back. They won't have all the old cached data, 
but it's not exactly catastrophic.

Seems to me Google doesn't need a "database" at all... they just need a 
reasonably reliably large-scale storage system that supports very fast 
indexing.

> Clearly, this isn't appropriate for (say) a bank's ATM network. But 
> there are lots of applications where nothing bad happens if there's 
> temporary inconsistency.

...which is why there's all those different isolation levels and stuff.

>> It would be a damned site *simpler* for it to not try to do all this 
>> emulation. In fact, it would be a lot more *efficient* too. But 
>> where's the market in that?
> 
> Yeah. Some of the chips were actually RISC chips basically interpreting 
> x86 machine code, is my undertanding.

My understanding is that current mainstream CPUs are some weird 
RISC/CISC hybrid that's so complicated that it's difficult to know 
*what* to call it! o_O

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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