The same could probably be said about the internal combustion engine, but it might soon be replaced by electric batteries, which provide a much more elegant solution.
I believe that "unbundled" databases, such as Crux[1], can become the electric batteries of the database world by making a lot of the current complexity irrelevant.
After read https://www.confluent.io/blog/turning-the-database-inside-ou... I wondered about that. I think that make the log first class and "plug" relational tables (optionally) will make a amazing database engine. In short, you PERSIST your commands:
POST /City ..
PUT /City ..
DELETE /City ..
POST /SendMail (to:...)
and have the flexibility to bundle the domain logic on top of the data logic in a single lang. This is my long term goal..
2) the separation of reads and writes allows for elegant horizontal read-scaling without coordination/consensus
3) pluggable storage backends implemented as simple Clojure protocols (as the sibling comment mentions), which eliminates a large number of performance and durability concerns
4) combining schema-on-read with entity-attribute-value indexing means there's no need to interpret and support a user-defined schema
5) Datalog is simpler to implement and use than the full SQL standard or alternative graph query languages
...I work on Crux :)
SQL certainly provides a lot of bells and whistles but Crux has the advantage of consistent in-process queries (i.e. the "database as a value") which means you can combine custom code with multiple queries efficiently to achieve a much larger range of possibilities, such as graph algorithms like Bidirectional BFS [1].
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.09930.pdf
[1] https://github.com/juxt/crux/blob/master/docs/example/imdb/s...