"We examine this hypothesis by measuring the amount of swapping in these workloads with the vmstat Linux utility. As expected, we observe no swapping activity,

"We examine this hypothesis by measuring the amount of swapping in these workloads with the vmstat Linux utility. As expected, we observe no swapping activity, indicating little value in providing the capability to swap." Yes, but that's obvious - if your DB application starts swapping, you have badly misconfigured something. A well-tuned server should never have any swap activity. But there is still page-oriented I/O for explicitly invoked I/Os, and it's still crucial to support that properly. Granted, 4KB pages are probably too small for today's storage hardware. 2MB or 4MB pages might even be too small too. (multiply pagesize * I/O transfer rate, compare to average seek time. Ideally you want pagesize * rate to be greater than seek time, but that hasn't been true in decades.)