Curtis, my top source of scoops, pointed me to this breathless review of Sun's new transactional memory hardware, making bold predictions that Sun will -- and I quote: "horsefuck the database world".

But unless I'm really missing something, how does this help?  A database's bottleneck is not thread synchronization, it's atomic writing to disk.  Sure, transaction management of in-memory data is costly.  But not nearly as costly as writing updates to disk in an infallible manner.

Maybe there are specific database scenarios that really benefit from this.  But a read-heavy scenario doesn't have a lot of transactional overhead, and a write-heavy scenario will be bound by disk write performance.

So again, where does this help?  I must be totally missing something.  Can you help steer me straight?

-david barrett