mtillman-921105 (9/21/2010)
To what extent were relational DBMS created because drive space wasn't cheap and processing power was weak? Big, flat tables weren't helpful in either case years ago.
Perhaps that was some of the driving force, though I think that the ACID properties weren't available in flat files either.
These days we're going back to XML sometimes and that's almost like scanning a flat file in many instances.
Not sure about graphic cards. I know there have been some improvements over time, moving to new algorithms, but not sure about the brute force storing all pixels inside them.