I mentioned recently that my new kick is storage platforms for Internet-scale services. Sometimes it's hard to describe the problems that large scale services have with modern relational databases. Thankfully, I now have the post I want a big, virtual database by Greg Linden to crib a simple 1 sentence description of the problem and solution. Greg writes

In my previous story about Amazon, I talked about a problem with an Oracle database.

You know, eight years later, I still don't see what I really want from a database. Hot standbys and replication remain the state of the art.

What I want is a robust, high performance virtual relational database that runs transparently over a cluster, nodes dropping in an out of service at will, read-write replication and data migration all done automatically.

I want to be able to install a database on a server cloud and use it like it was all running on one machine.

It's interesting how your database problems change when you're thinking about hundreds of transactions a second over terabytes of data belonging to hundreds of millions of users.You might also be interested in Greg's post on Google's BigTable.