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Comment by snthpy | Hacker News Reader

Andy Pavlo also deserves a shout out; he's an authority on databases and lives a "data oriented lifestyle". See his two "What goes around comes around ..." papers for great overviews of the past and future 50 years in databases respectively (as well as all the amazing CMU Seminar Series). I'm excited to see him involved in this.

My apologies to the Chinese coauthors who I'm not familiar with.

Bookmarked for thorough reading!

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I've been looking for an article that I think I found 10+ years ago on the web about a very similar topic, something like "the evolution of database systems". It was a very well written article that I just skimmed through and planned to read properly but could never find it again. I remember it had hand-drawn-style diagrams of database architectures with blue backgrounds, sometimes squiggly lines and maybe even some bees on them (could be just my mind mixing it with something). I'd be eternally grateful if someone here could find it.

Not sure if this is what you had in mind but here are the links to the two papers that I was referencing.

[1] covers the first 40 years of databases. [2] fills in the gap of the last 20 years and gives their thoughts on the future.

My apologies, the first one was actually Stonebraker & Hellerstein and didn't involve Pavlo. They're both excellent papers though for anyone working with data.

Stonebraker, for those who don't know, is the creator of Postgres, a database you might have heard of.

1: Stonebraker & Hellerstein, "What Goes Around Comes Around", 2005, https://people.csail.mit.edu/tdanford/6830papers/stonebraker...

2: Stonebraker & Pavlo, "What Goes Around Comes Around... And Around...", 2024, https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2024/whatgoesaround-sigmodrec20...

Deepseek -> ?? https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/03/04/turning-the-database... and https://speakerdeck.com/ept/transactions-myths-surprises-and...

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