How about a terabyte of RAM? Would that change your notion about how a database ought to behave on your platform? If your platform is SGI's Octane III, capable of hosting almost 1TB of RAM along with up to 80 cores, the notion of in-memory data processing for analytics might be worth another look. Industry veterans won't be surprised by this evolution -- not revolution -- in technology. Balancing slower memory stores (typically disk-based) against higher speed stores (not only RAM, historically speaking, but higher performance drives) is an old challenge dating back to the 70's if not before. This 2008 ACM paper by A. Leventhal is one of several pointing to flash memory as just the lastest element in the long tradition of storage hierarchy juggling. Lower prices and newer technology have simply moved the problem into a larger interest group. Business analytics and database processing, typified by Qlikview and Microsoft's Gemini project among others, are just two obvious candidates.
