SSDs are already insanely fast, and the file model has served us well enough. It makes persistence explicit.
Considering that rebooting is currently the primary way of fixing any malfunctioning device, blurring RAM and disk doesn't seem that helpful. Things will crash and you will still need that distinction to some degree, no matter what the storage tech is. Some stuff is volatile and some stuff isn't.
We still need to explicitly define what happens when we reboot.
What makes optane really interesting to me is the endurance. They seem like they would be great as traditional SSDs hosting databases.
Not just “traditional SSDs”, which are block-addressable.
A byte-addressable Optane RAM would enable a database that no longer “thinks” in pages, but can independently persist much smaller pieces of its internal structures, possibly leading to new paradigms compared to what we have now. Perhaps write-ahead logs, B-Trees and other stuff can be implemented better when you are no longer limited to writing entire pages?
Considering that rebooting is currently the primary way of fixing any malfunctioning device, blurring RAM and disk doesn't seem that helpful. Things will crash and you will still need that distinction to some degree, no matter what the storage tech is. Some stuff is volatile and some stuff isn't.
We still need to explicitly define what happens when we reboot.
What makes optane really interesting to me is the endurance. They seem like they would be great as traditional SSDs hosting databases.