The distinction between database (disk) and memory being an artifact of the memory hierarchy, I wonder what will happen to the concept of the database itself, should technological advances erase the speed difference between disk and memory. Will we simply be 'saving' data into special collection variables in memory?
I suspect that due to Moore's law issues we will abandon the concept of synchronous memory access altogether and make the cache hierarchy more visible. Already a cache miss is thousands of cycles, and algorithm complexity analysis that assumes memory access is O(1) can lead to poor real-world results compared to cache aware algorithms.
