Is the submarine at work again?

CPUs are also still running almost the same kind of instructions as conceived 30 years ago, but the internals have changed a lot. I suspect the same is true for databases - there must have been some technological progress, even if SQL itself hasn't changed.

And for CPUs, there are also special interest flavors (signal processors) that outperform the standard ones in special cases, but they don't make the "generic" CPUs superfluous.

> it provides built-in features appropriate to the needs of 2007 customers

I get that they're arguing that the database should fit the customer, but isn't that rather a drastic market size limit to impose on oneself?