This seems suspiciously like a marketing presentation for VoltDB more than debunking myth about SQL.
Tl;Dr; SQL is too slow ? No, VoltDB is Fast !
Tl;Dr; SQL is too slow ? No, VoltDB is Fast !
++ He believes SQL is the "right" and most proven access model. (Note that SQL does not mean RDBMS like Oracle/MSSQL.)
++ He believes in ACID
++ He believes that other db engines' (NoSQL, etc) approaches to gain speed and scaling of clusters by sacrificing SQL and ACID is wrong and his proof is that those other products end up eventually bolting on SQL and ACID anyway.
I think a better presentation to flesh out these ideas is the following youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRcecxdGxvQ
It's 55 minutes long so to save time, HN readers may prefer to browse it by pressing "L" key to step through it quickly. Just read the slides shown behind him and if the bullet points look interesting, rewind and listen to his presentation.
One can dwell on those SQL/ACID merits in isolation and consider separately, the question of whether VoltDB-as-a-product fulfills those ideals.
I've flagged it, not because it's not interesting (some of it is), but because marketing propaganda can't really be trusted as a source of information.
Usually a lot of people saying SQL is slow is because they don't really use it well. He doesn't talk about indexing and statistics [1] for example.
But he talks about ODBC/JDBC because, while it is usually fast enough, a lot of people overlook the fact that these interfaces hold transactions externally.
Besides, the presentations comes from Stonebreaker himself; of (Turing prize, Von Neumann Medal, ingres, postgres, cstore, vertica, hstore, SciDB, Tamr, Streambase)-fame.
[1] http://use-the-index-luke.com/ is a very good resource for this.
Though in 2016, there are a lot more fast SQL systems and it’s unclear this myth is still as mythical as it was?