A trend that happened in industry around ten-ish years ago is extremely instructive for what we see again and again is the rise of NoSQL and Shadow IT. See, at a lot of companies it got to the point where databases were Hard™. There were a lot of rules around them, schemas were difficult to manage, and specialists were required to make sure your performance was not terrible. What wasn't controlled by these factors got ruled by magical thinking, a kind of mythology where "when we misuse the database we get bad results, so clearly the problem is the database." So the industry started finding salvation (using that word deliberately) in "shadow IT." Developers basically spinning up their own infrastructure and using "NoSQL" databases because it didn't have all of the rules that using a database had. We as an industry quickly saw why this was a problem, but for several years it was considered Good Thing™ and a huge performance boost for the organization. Everything was magical. People talked about the "death of SQL databases." But it turns out that "Shadow IT" created huge security threats (whoops), performance was typically not clear cut, thinking in these technologies was not straightforward, and that a lot of the problems with "schemaless" development started to cause significant velocity issues over time. A lot of databases started to implement query languages on top of them that looked distinctly like SQL. Some of them were even named variations on the theme, like GoogleSQL. The "NoSQL databases" (I still hate that term, I have a NoSQL toaster! it doesn't have any digital interface, but it also doesn't have a SQL interface) got folded into traditional IT, which was reshaped more by the prevalence of "cloud" and "serverless" architectures. The databases themselves stopped advertising themselves as lifestyle products for developers and started advertising themselves as serious IT products. But. We still _use_ the NoSQL databases. BigTable, Mongo, Redis, Cassandra, etc all have various use cases. Some of the more hybrid tools—like BigQuery and Spanner—see a great deal of use even while never quite getting rid of traditional database structures. Anyways, welcome to AI.