In their 1992 Transaction Processing book*, Gray and Reuter extrapolate h/w and s/w trends forward and predict that the DBMS of their far future would look like a tape robot for backing store with materialised views in main memory.

Substitute streams for tape i/o, and Samza sounds like it could be very similar to that vision.

* as far as I know, their exposition of the WAL and tradeoffs in its implementation has aged well. Any counter opinions?