While still in the realm of academia, these papers provide some structure and proof to the interesting real-world implementations of seemingly-weird database architectures that have popped up recently in order to meet the demands of high concurrency/availability Internet-based services.

"We conclude that the current RDBMS code lines, while attempting to be a “one size fits all” solution, in fact, excel at nothing. Hence, they are 25 year old legacy code lines that should be retired in favor of a collection of “from scratch” specialized engines. The DBMS vendors (and the research community) should start with a clean sheet of paper and design systems for tomorrow’s requirements, not continue to push code lines and architectures designed for yesterday’s needs."

Amen. I'll be watching this space closely.