Traditional databases don’t address all these aspects perfectly. There’s plenty of room for improvement. However, many keyvalue stores have started to add database features such as indexes, query languages, and, probably soon, distributed transaction support, and they’re effectively turn ing into distributed databases. This is a promising development, although I encourage developers to look into the literature from time to time. They might find that some parts of this work have already been done. For example, following the recent index support in MongoDB, it seems as if history is unnecessarily repeating itself, with many mistakes on the way before a solution like ARIES3 eventually arises. (After a long debate over how to conduct index recovery, the ARIES paper got published in 1992. It’s now considered the standard and imple mented in many commercial data base systems.) Still, I don’t claim that the database community has solved everything, only that we should stand on the shoulder of giants.