Software services would all support being plugged into a distributed transaction manager, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open_XA https://en.wikipedia.org

Software services would all support being plugged into a distributed transaction manager, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open_XA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X/Open_XA . Instead there has been more of a shift toward embracing inconsistency. Another: There was always this idea that in the future, applications would be built to run on the database, such as with stored procedures. Obviously, this was widely done, and continues to be done, but it never really matured in the way we expected. There is still a big gap in tooling to make this easy. This is also related to the ideas we had back then about object persistence. One day, we imagined, we would just manipulate objects in memory, and all of the concerns about persisting those changes, including making it performant, would be taken care of. Also, transactional memory was surely going to be the norm, whether in software or hardware.