One thing that is important to note though is that data bases are probably not going to disappear from the world anytime soon. Their role in our application architecture is going to change quite fundamentally as you rightly suggested. It is therefore important to mention that while while our system of record can be now stored safely in-memory using IMDG (In Memory Data Grids) it can still be integrated and synchronized with existing data bases. A great deal has been invested on figuring out what should be the right way of doing that in order that we wouldn’t loose the performance benefits of IMDG on one hand and the consistency of the data of our existing data base on the other hand. For that purpose we came up with a model which i refer to as PaaS = Persistencey as Service. Actually Guy Nirpaz came up with a more creative name for it - Eventually Persistent:)