cmu

Andy Pavlo opens CMU’s database systems course with a claim that reframes most of what practitioners argue about online: the problems are not new. The hardware changed; the problems didn’t. This week’s Classic of the Week is his Lecture 1 — course information plus a compressed history of database systems from the 1960s to the present. It’s the single best hour for understanding why databases look the way they do, and it comes with an implicit warning: if you don’t know this history, you will spend your career re-litigating settled debates....