As should be clear from this paper, modern commercial database systems are grounded both in academic research and in the experiences of developing industrial-strength products for high-end customers. The task of writing and maintaining a high-performance, fully functional relational DBMS from scratch is an enormous investment in time and energy. Many of the lessons of relational DBMSs, however, translate over to new domains. Web services, network-attached storage, text and e-mail repositories, notification services, and network monitors can all benefit from DBMS research and experience. Data-intensive services are at the core of computing today, and knowledge of database system design is a skill that is broadly applicable, both inside and outside the halls of the main database shops. These new directions raise a number of research problems in database management as well, and point the way to new interactions between the database community and other areas of computing.

Architecture of a Database System – Joseph M. Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker and James Hamilton