Software Engineering Daily · Tuesday, September 15, 2026
Salish Krishna Murty observes that over the last decade, enterprise IT has become significantly more sophisticated, with customers demanding more from database systems. This shift, partly fueled by open-source software, has led to the rise of 'scale-out' systems like Google's Bigtable and Spanner, which have fundamentally changed the database landscape.
“Especially over the last three or four years. In the AI era, but even if you zoom out from that, one of the biggest changes I think has happened maybe over the last 10 years, is how sophisticated enterprise IT has become.”
“Traditional databases where scale-ups systems. And so while they evolved coming to the cloud in a very evolutionary path, there were also these revolutionary systems, scale-out systems. Big table was one of them, that we built in Google about 10 or 20 years back, and Spaner and one of them.”