To expand on the database point, there is a great paper by Stonebraker and Hellerstein covering the lessons learned and forgotten over the last 35 years of data

To expand on the database point, there is a great paper by Stonebraker and Hellerstein covering the lessons learned and forgotten over the last 35 years of database research - http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.113.5640 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.113....