In my Tech Tuesday posts I have covered main memory and storage (by the way, coming up tomorrow: HTTP). If you have read those or otherwise follow hardware, then you will find this short piece from BBC Technology News on a new technology known as ReRAM quite interesting. Essentially, ReRAM holds the promise of providing non-volatile storage at the speed of memory.
That would provide a major breakthrough for database applications. Not only is ReRAM even faster than the Flash memory used in the SSDs (which are currently replacing traditional disk drives for high end database applications) but it obviates the need for going to disk in the first place. That means the whole intermediate software layer that controls disk access falls away as well.
What is amazing is not just that this is possible at all, but also the history of this technology. ReRAM is based on something called a Memristor which was invented as a theoretical possibility in 1971 (much after the Transistor which was invented in 1947). Then it took until 2008 to build a Memristor. From that breakthrough by HP it seems that commercial products may be available as early as next year!
