Databases have evolved by leaps and bounds over the past few years, providing new ways of accommodating increasingly enormous online operations, but because of the trade-off between availability and consistency — which is more of a continuum than a choice between black and white — they have evolved in many different directions. LinkedIn has built at least two massive databases of its own. Google has built at least three. And the open source world is littered with NoSQL databases, all trying to serve particular needs. But in the future, these various threads will come back together. The future will look more like Manhattan. “The big web companies,” Goffinet says, “are already doing this.”