When I was first introduced to Oracle years ago, I was surprised at how much it acted like an operating system inside. Once connected to the shell you could find processes running, examine memory through data dictionary queries and so forth. Tuning it involved looking at disk I/O patterns, memory usage and making your loops tighter. In the SQL world that meant indexing & reviewing plans for joins carefully.

MySQL & Postgres carry some of those same attributes. Even though they are user processes and the OS controls the lower levels, you would typically deploy them on their own servers, and give them all the memory & disk I/O you could, because they were their own operating systems essentially.

It's not clear to me how building a database "like an operating system" is something new. What I did see new in there was a consistency checking tool. That is super important. Because in a distributed environment you're bound to have drift.

Also I'd like to see how they managed to get full ACID Compliance. Fast network interfaces are great but there is still some latency which means hiccups when multiple nodes try to update the same row.