Congratulations to the RethinkDB team on their fundraising round!

2010 will be an incredibly exciting year for database technology. The amount of stored information has long been increasing exponentially, presenting unprecedented challenges for modern technology companies. Dropping RAM prices and affordable multicore CPUs have drastically changed the hardware profile of a typical server machine from what it was only five years ago. The emergence of solid-state drives is about to revolutionize database systems, enabling new kinds of applications we can barely envision today.

Indeed. We’re seeing some pretty amazing results at work where we’re in the process of replacing a large number of traditional RAID-10 arrays of power hungry and [comparatively] slow spinning disks with solid-state storage. The performance gains are hard to imagine if you haven’t seen them for yourself first-hand.

I was excited and honored to become an advisor to RethinkDB last year. The team has a very real chance to build something revolutionary at a time when a major shift of our computing infrastructure is working its way around the industry.

These are very interesting times for anyone building data intensive back-end services on-line.