But (speculation alert!) I wonder if we might see a ‘deployment era’ for data just like we’re currently seeing in software. Instead of massive horizontal platforms covering entire information categories like people, companies, or events, I wonder if more targeted, bespoke, vertical- or application-focused data businesses will emerge — data for very specific niches. We shall see!

My databases class at UCLA wasn’t very challenging so I never truly understood the internals of databases. This always bothered me so I vowed to build a simple database from scratch to learn the fundamentals. MIT’s Database Systems course has their students implement a simple database from scratch and it provided me the perfect guidance in achieving my goal. The SimpleDB database I built has basic RDBMS features like a SQL query parser, transactions, and a query optimizer. This blog post provides an outline of SimpleDB’s architecture and implementation.