One of the guys who designed soups (Walter Smith) went to Microsoft and worked on the database-based storage system for Longhorn. It didn't go that well; my tak

One of the guys who designed soups (Walter Smith) went to Microsoft and worked on the database-based storage system for Longhorn. It didn't go that well; my take is that the project got really big and politicized -- classic Microsoft -- and he wound up leaving after a while. I think that systems like ReThinkDB are really close, if not superior. One thing the Newt never had to worry about was concurrency; the scripting environment was single-threaded, and the storage system only ever had one transaction at a time (with some advanced cheating going on for background storage operations and garbage collection). Modern systems solve harder problems, albeit with many orders of magnitude more resources and way better tools.