> What could have saved it? Persistent memory was/is a big topic in the database research world. The idea was that you would not need to worry about ACID since

> What could have saved it? Persistent memory was/is a big topic in the database research world. The idea was that you would not need to worry about ACID since all your data is still there in the event of a power loss/crash. It would massively simplify database code. However as it turns out... persistent memory doesn't buy you all that much. You still effectively need a replay log to restore the state you were in before a crash event, and you still need all the restoration code. In the end it in most systems it just behaved as a very fast (and expensive) SSD. The benefits vs. price just wasn't there as a modern DB setup on a fast SSD + more RAM would get you much more performance per dollar. What you'd really need is transactional memory, not just persistent memory. And you'd need a database engine written completely from the ground up to use this memory. Probably several hundred KLoC of tricky code (and all the joys that come with parallel programming), targeted at hardware that doesn't even exist yet. Sounds very expensive and risky to me. I think eventually we'll see something in this line of technology become commercially available. But I'm not surprised that Intel pulled out.