> What if your disk layer could already preselect your data so the database wouldn't have to read and discard so many rows for each query? My impression is tha

> What if your disk layer could already preselect your data so the database wouldn't have to read and discard so many rows for each query? My impression is that that the process of filtering DB rows is sufficiently complex to need a full libc type execution environment. But taking a big step back in perspective, a famous example of filtering on processors connected to disks is Map-Reduce, aka Hadoop. > What if the network controller could evaluate your firewall rules itself, so dropped packets wouldn't have to interrupt the main CPU? Yes, this is a real thing: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nic+packet+filter+offload https://duckduckgo.com/?q=nic+packet+filter+offload