1.) Reading the position paper should help you with that. It cites some prior literature. In particular the DeWitt paper should be a good jumping off point on citeseer or the like. For that matter, reading DeWitt's papers should cover a great deal of academia's exploration of novel database architectures.

2.) It's a position paper. It's not attempting to assert a novel invention from day one, it's staking a claim about the design space (and further that you should fund us to do research in this space).

3.) The project is ongoing, you can see some preliminary results on their wiki. Most notable are some details on very low latency RPC and very rapid recovery. The recovery work rediscovers the same essential prescription as bigtable but does so via a second sharding scheme, which I believe is novel. Whether it's better is open to debate.

Sorry if I seem cranky, but I'm damn tired of people doing drive by criticisms of "ALREADY BEEN DONE BRO" on hackernews, particularly when they clearly haven't even read the primary sources.

Novelty or originality are not the only requirements for noteworthiness. A great deal gets done confirming prior experience or making relatively modest and obvious evolutionary extensions of previously well known work.

No worries. It was a query of clarification not trolling, thanks.

can you cite an example of when DRAM is used for persistent storage? I am not aware of any.

There are a few products the use primarily DRAM, usually backed by capacitors/batteries and flash.

ZeusRAM SAS drive: http://www.stec-inc.com/product/zeusram.php

RamSan rack-mounted: http://www.ramsan.com/products/rackmount-ram-storage/ramsan-...

Kaminario K2 SAN: http://www.kaminario.com/products/K2-Solid-State-SAN-Storage...

Further examples of combo products:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOPS

acid-state, http://acid-state.seize.it/, which was previously known as happstack-state, and before that HAppS-State, has been doing it since 2005 or so.

acid-state currently lacks replication/multimaster support, but happstack-state has had several experimental implementations of that as well.

acid-state is Haskell specific.. but that is part of the appeal. You can directly store fancy algebraic data structures with acid-state. You are not limited to a simple combination of records integers and strings (for example).

SATA2 DDR2 HyperDrive5 64GB: A Solid State DDR drive.

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm

Something like http://www.anandtech.com/show/1742 seems similar.

Did that thing ever actually ship?

Yep, you could buy it new up until a couple years ago.

http://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GC-RAMDISK-i-RAM-Hard-Drive/d...

Yes, I have one working OK in a ZFS based server.