A couple of weeks ago, I was in an internal meeting where our CTO (Adam Prout) was giving a talk to our summer interns. The talk was about the current state of database companies, and how different providers are competing on different facets of their products. As the talk was nearing its end, I wrote down this quote (slightly edited):

“You will not find a broader set of Computer Science problems inside one piece of software than by working on a cloud database, especially general-purpose databases that attempt to solve a lot of different use cases. You get to work on all kinds of things from memory management, scheduling algorithms, low-level optimizations like SIMD and efficient operations on compressed data, query optimization, etc. And then there’s the whole cloud-native set of challenges. There’s cloud computing and figuring out how to best use things like blob stores/S3, and security and all the rest of it.”

This quote stuck with me. Obviously, having worked at SingleStore for many years now, this is not really news to me. However, I had never heard it put so succinctly like this. Databases are hard to build, and when people think of the inte