This article surveys two decades of database system architecture innovations—including columnar stores, cloud databases, data lakes, NewSQL, hardware accelerators, and blockchain databases—highlighting their motivations, trade‑offs, and the shifting landscape that shapes modern DBMS design.
The DataFunCon 2024 Beijing conference opened with keynote speeches on the evolution of Alibaba Cloud's big data platform, explored distributed data warehousing, large model research, and practical AI applications, and concluded with a round‑table discussing future trends and enterprise strategies for big data and AI integration.
The article explains how enterprises must organize increasingly complex data—from structured sources to social media and IoT—to unlock AI value, describing data lakes, hybrid cloud strategies, and the concept of an AI assembly line that integrates tools, containers, and cross‑functional teams for scalable machine‑learning deployment.
The article analyzes the decline of Hadoop as the dominant big‑data platform, explains how cloud‑based services are replacing its complex on‑premises architecture, and outlines the lessons and future directions for enterprises navigating a post‑Hadoop landscape.
